Economist who praised Brown wins Nobel

Not content with multi-billion-pound bail-outs of British banks, does Gordon Brown also have a hand in awarding Nobel Prizes? Yesterday, the American economist Paul Krugman (pictured) wrote an op-ed article for the New York Times entitled 'Gordon Does Good', in which he said: "The Brown government has shown itself willing to think clearly about the financial crisis, and act quickly on its conclusions." Today, it was announced that Krugman had won the Nobel Prize for Economics.

Krugman began his Times piece asking: "Has Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, saved the world financial system?" Although it was, he admitted, too early to say for sure whether Brown would rescue us all, there was no doubt the PM's tactics stood a greater chance than others. "Luckily for the world economy, Gordon Brown and his officials are making sense. And they may have shown us the way through this crisis."

The Swedes have especially commended Krugman for showing "the effects of economies of scale on trade patterns and on the location of economic activity". The professor must now use that economic nous to work out which in bank he can safely stash his $1.4m prize money.

Meanwhile questions are being asked about how an unexpectedly large number of bets were placed on the French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio to win the $1.4m Nobel Prize for Literature - a few days ahead of the Swedish Academy's official announcement last Thursday.

Bookmakers Ladbrokes were a little surprised last week when they witnessed a rush on Le Clezio. The head of Ladbrokes' Nordic operations, Lasse Dilschmann, decided to close the book when he saw the odds go from 15/1 to less than 2/1 in a single day. "I have a strong suspicion that there has been a leak in the system this time," Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy said on Friday.