Quem se lixa é o mexilhão

Maybe it is the scale of it; maybe the sense that an extreme American mutation of capitalism is finally getting its come-uppance. Maybe it is that no one here in Britain – except a few unfortunate Northern Rock shareholders – has yet actually lost any hard cash.

Almost 10 years have passed since Bill Clinton defined the modern social contract in terms every one of his fellow citizens could understand. "The main idea," he said, "is still the old idea of the American dream... that if you work hard and play by the rules, you ought to have a decent life and a chance for your children to have a better one." Such a contract is common to every civilised country. Over the past year it has been fed progressively into the corporate shredder.

Let's try getting back to basics. Just as there is no such thing as a victimless crime, there is no crime without a culprit. And the culprits in this case are the financial wizards who persuaded themselves that risk could be chopped into ever tinier pieces, to the point where it seemed conveniently to vanish. The culprits are also the regulators who allowed them to get away with it.

Not one of these culprits – individually, collectively or institutionally – however, is going to take the rap. Oh yes, there have been resignations among the financial wizards, and there will be more – softened, of course, by generous pay-offs, but no penalty to trouble the sleep of those who made their fortunes in the good times. They converted their risk to security long ago; their luxury lifestyles are inviolate.

Meanwhile, savers are squeezed from the other side by a government that needs to hold interest rates down in the hope that consumer spending can keep the economy growing. As for those private pensions successive governments have compelled us to take out, the coincidence of poor savings rates and a plunging stock market – a freak combination supposedly – threatens to leave forty- and fiftysomethings with nothing to retire on.

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