And so when I saw one of the worst troublemakers sneaking back in, I scratched my unshaven chin, chewed on my cigar butt, narrowed my beady eyes into deadly slits and buckled up my two trusty six guns for another shootout, just like the ol' days.

The sneaky varmint in question is the heavily-marketed one-year discount rate. Putting a big spin on one-year - or, God help us, six-month - deals was common in the past but not recently because savvy mortgage-holders see through them.

Halifax got a lot of kudos last week for its new one-year discount rate.

Matching the European Central Bank rate (3.5%) with no profit margin is an extremely low rate. But this lasts for only a year; the rate for the remaining 29 years of a mortgage is far more important.

Those with low loan-to-value ratios (50%) who qualify for this package would be better off with NIB's offer of ECB +0.5% (4%) because it lasts the entire mortgage term. In fairness, the Halifax mortgage reverts after year one to a very low of 4.4% and it has also reduced (with less fanfare) its standard variable rate mortgage to the lowest on the market at 4.55% But it is these figures that should have been the focus of attention, and not the short-term headline-grabber. (And don't forget about trackers such as those offered by NIB and Ulster Bank, which still better even the best standard variable rates. ) Halifax's new deals are very welcome but it's a pity it had to revert to old-school short-term discounts, which distort the market and make it hard to compare products.