It is hard to watch the unfolding banking crisis without just the hint of a smug grin. For years those working in city institutions have been cashing in massive bonuses for coming up with ever more imaginative and complicated ways of making money, systems which no-one apart from themselves seems to understand.

It’s been a glamour world of big money going round and round in big shiny office blocks.
Now, however, the shine has become dull. We’ve got the sub-prime crisis which was brought about as banks sold on the mortgages they had given to people who had a high risk of defaulting to other financial institutions.
And now the bizarre term ‘naked short selling’ is on everyone’s lips –
making money by gambling that the price of something you don’t own will fall. The whole house of cards is tumbling down.
But in reality, there is nothing to smile about. It is the man and woman at the bottom of the heap who will end up paying the bill. The people who should never have been given a mortgage in the first place and who now find themselves mired in debt. The pensioners who will not get rises in line with inflation because their pension fund has gambled on the stock market and lost. And the office cleaners and sandwich boys who have lost their jobs.
And of course all the rest of us who are being hit by the knock-on effects.