High-end financial people shake their heads over the carworkers who are facing layoffs and benefit cuts. “Couldn’t they see what was coming? They’ll just have to adjust to a new world, cut back, and work on acquiring new skills.”

Unfortunately those are words the financial managers themselves will soon have to live by. There are proportionately more professional investors who will be (and should be) facing redundancy than skilled manual workers with the same prospect. There are too many people paid six- and seven-figure compensation packages for knowing when to nod sagely, when to nod vigorously, and for having memorised the clerical steps needed to sell pools of leveraged risk as “out-performance”.