So, just to summarize where things stand on financial services:

The "industry" has got itself into a complete mess by recirculating money repeatedly on the assumption that property prices will continue to rise in perpetuity, in what was essentially a pyramid selling scheme.

The ultimate collapse was the precipitated by the "industry" feeding off itself by short selling of stocks, thus generating even more of a crisis than was warranted, and causing unnecessary distress amongst those who save real money that they have actually earned.

This has led to extreme volatility, with bank stocks fluctuating in price by more than a factor of ten on a timescale of weeks, rather suggesting that they have no intrinsic value.

Indeed, since the US taxpayer has ploughed money into its financial services "industry" to the tune of 300 billion dollars (a thousand dollars per head!) in just the last few weeks, the intrinsic value of these companies would appear to be rather strongly negative.

In fact, to sum up, the financial "services" "industry" only provides a real service to itself by allowing its employees to rake in massive personal profits. It is not in fact an industry since it does not produce anything of worth, but simply feeds off its own internal greed, at everyone else's expense.

So anyone who claims that this country's financial services "industry" is actually a net benefit to UK PLC is either an idiot or in on the scam.

Up to a cost of £17,000 per person in the UK to bail out the finbancial services "industry." Perhaps not so surprising that those who argued what a great net contribution this "industry" is to the country have now gone very quiet.

The moral of this story is: Get a job with the financial services industry.