Perhaps it's in the overlooked places such as Enfield – or Salford, setting up a local bank or Preston, concentrating its council spending on neighbourhood businesses – that the really interesting ideas are generated on how to mend a busted economy.
ENRON, even more than the dozens of busted dotcom companies, may come to epitomise the excesses of the 1990s, the way that Michael Milken and his investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert represented the Wall Street excesses of the 1980s.
Four years from now, they argue, against the background of a failing economy, steep tax rises and Gordon Brown in Number 10, New Labour will be a busted flush and the voters will be ready to support the party.
In America trustbusters say that busted price-fixers regularly offer to pay bigger fines to try and avoid jail.Waving a get-out-of-jail-free cardThe threat of jail also helps with the detection of cartels.
It was the decade of New Labour's gilded rise: lucky to have the busted Tories for an opponent and so obsessed with getting power that they arrived with little clue how to use it.
Government propagandists depict the green movement as a busted flush.
But Mr Musharraf was a busted flush, and his successors have at least one ace he never had in his hands: a democratic mandate.
That may not help the busted flush that is New Labour, but it is a warning to the Tories that the spirit of the age is not entirely with them.
As for the pro-royal "yellow shirts", hotheads whose anti-Thaksin protests created the conditions for the army coup, they appear to be a busted flush.
Although bin Laden's death was a cathartic moment for most Americans, and the special forces that swept through his squalid lair carried off an intelligence treasure trove, al-Qaeda's embattled leader had been a busted flush, from an operational point of view, for some time.
