Alistair, darling, could you pop out and fix the entire foundations of capitalism?

The financial markets are, of course, the closest thing mankind has developed to real magic over the course of their history. When iron ore is extracted from the earth, there is an obvious cost and an obvious product that, obviously, requires a profit for it to be worthwhile. When that ore is taken and refined, again there is an obvious cost, obvious product and necessary profit.

This process continues, until suckers like us by their latest car or computer or shiny bauble. The difference of this process occurs at a level above most of us can aspire to, where banks and financial institutions take the baffling steps of selling money to each other in such a fashion as to somehow magically increase the net amount of money that exists in the world. The difference, for those who haven’t fixed upon it yet, is the complete absence of any tangible product. Oh, perhaps if you’re lucky you’ll get some piece of paper that promises you the lion’s share of the Brooklyn Bridge, but if you’re buying into that then you’re part of the problem, and not the solution.

With the sub-prime crisis, collapse of multiple American banks and now the entirely arbitrary collapse of the venerable and entirely financially sound Halifax and Bank of Scotland and its resultant merger with Lloyds TSB seemingly on the whim of some financial traders on the lookout for a quick, short sold buck, it seems that the world has finally seem through the smoke and mirrors to see the horse and pony show that the FTSE and the NASDAC and their acronym compadres represent and called shenanigans.

The downside to this, of course, is that the entire basis of our capitalist civilization falls right over with the money grubbing tosstards. Repossession rates are on the rise, food costs so much it may unintentionally prove to be a boon to obesity statistics and old age pensioners are hoping for a warm winter, lest they become cryogenically frozen earlier than anticipated due to being unable to meet the fuel bills.

While any child raised in Scotland under the harsh flags of Thatcher’s Britain will typically have a natural sympathy for anyone made redundant through mismanagement and market forces, it strains my wooly, liberal heart to find any sympathy for the besuited purveyors of increasingly dodgily constructed houses of cards.

With acccusations of the FSA’s stop on short selling having been delayed so that the Americans could announce it first, directly contributing to the LloydsHBOSTSB fiasco, surely it’s time to ask quite what has been so special from our ’special relationship’ with America, apart from now having a cratering economy to add to the substantial number of craters in the hole where Iraq used to be. This relationship is special in the same way that ’special schools’ are special.

The Top Banana’s financial advice remains, as always, to keep your assets liquid, mainly in stocks of vodka. It won’t solve any economic crises, but it makes the pain of them somewhat more tolerable.