Give them your money

You do not earn much - just enough to put aside some savings. Each penny of those savings is a product of hard work done and pleasures foregone. What do you do with these savings to protect them? One option is to place them in the trust of a very wealthy man. He tells you that he will gamble your money on unsafe schemes which he does not understand and which have failed spectacularly in the recent past. Irrespective of whether these make money or not, he will award himself and his friends a huge ‘bonus’ on top of his already magnificent salary, drawn from your savings and the savings of people like yourself. Do you trust your savings to him? Of course you do - because you have put your money in banks all your life.

There are other options of course. You could put your sayings in a mutual, like the Co-operative Bank. Or governments could break up the grossly-oversized ‘high street banks’, regulate how much bankers pay each other from our savings, and force them to invest in British enterprises rather than derivatives or other forms of speculation. Fat chance of that though.