<strong>Are markets becoming part of the problem?</strong>

‘Should we blame it all on City spivs?’ I asked a managing director of a famous investment bank at a pre-Christmas party.

He had just told me – with the smile of a man who can look forward to yet another seven-figure bonus in a few weeks’ time – that his firm was still doing very nicely thank you. It was doing so, he continued in the same breath despite the fact that the economy was going to hell – and his forecast for the state of the nation’s, rather than his own, wealth in 2008 was as startlingly downbeat and bluntly phrased as any I have yet heard in this winter of doomsaying. Adapting the famous words of the senior civil servant Sir Richard Mottram at the time of the debacle over ‘burying bad news’ at the Department of Transport on the day of 9/11, my banker friend said: ‘I’m f***ed.