In 1975 I took the first part of two part exams in Canada that one needs to practice there as a stockbroker, not that I ever did. I just wanted to understand investment better since I worked in IT for the investment division of a bank there.

I am pretty sure I learned that there it was illegal to set up a business whose primary objective was profit. I wonder if the same is true in the United Kingdom?

What I do remember for sure was learning then about derivatives. That made me very uneasy because as I saw them as a form of gambling and that was in the days when investment companies were primarily expected to only use their own money unless a customer sanctioned it on his own account.

To me it is immoral to seek profit with no actual product or service provided to back it up. Otherwise, for every profit there are losers and not necessarily for any good reason. That is why I abhor gambling, so much so that I would be happy to see it made illegal.

I make a distinction here from true investment where the time frame is long term. That differentiates it from speculation.

I also did not believe that investing in property was as safe as houses, recognising even then that things could change.

I kept quiet about my views not expecting anyone to agree with me but the credit crunch proved me right about both speculative investment instruments and also about property.

As a result of all this, I am very much hoping the banks will be downsized and allow to fail when they deserve to. But it is as important to separate investment from retail.

If feasible, I would like laws that define speculation as investments baseds on a return within five years or less but I will leave that to the experts to decide how many years that actually should be. Then I would like to see it made illegal for speculative investments on that definition unless the investor is using his own money or has written authorisation beforehand literally from every individual and organisation whose money is at risk.

many central bankers and economists warned about the property bubble as early as 2003. they warned of an asset bubble driven by cheap money.

these warnings were ignored for various reasons firstly:

a) a property and finance boom provided alot of tax revenue.

b) someone up there claimed to have solved boom and bust,

c) someone clever even devised the so-called golden rules. then moved the goal-posts continuously for politically convenient reasons. the result was that we would never balance the budget over the economic cycle.

it would have taken a while for most of the country to clock-on but for sure i would say all politicians in general would rather defer economic pain if they can.

and the last decade in particular was a decadent debt fuelled one for the west as a whole and the payback time would have come sooner or later.

the problem is that brown didn't really solve anything and in fact made the underlying problems worse. what we probably should have had was a short sharp house price crash (though some like to call it correction) the solution of near zero rates, even more debt and printing money will help create the next financial crisis.

you'll see a few things happening before the next major financial crisis (which will happen before the end of 2012) - price of gold, oil and other commodities rise (due to QE), one of the PIGS will default on debts and then a massive whirl-wind crisis/depression of enormous proportions which will ultimately mean that most major western economies will not be able to finance deficits for atleast a decade and follow higher savings rates of their asian counterparts. the asian economies will become much more richer too.

Yes it'll be interesting to see more balanced and expert views about what gives in banking. But I shouldn't worry too much about speculation - it's only playing and it does help people think the unthinkable, which in this particular context is probably OK.

I can take the point about workers who think what they do is so important. I hope they just need bringing back down to earth with better education but this is hard to do even when we've all been able to tell something is going so badly it'll probably end up in tears. Some don't seem to be able to recognise or understand the signs of failure at work without unnecessary and or inappropriate dismissals and/or court type scenarios. One wonders if workers like this are either thick or pretending to be thick.. either way the important question I think is whether positions like turning a blind eye to the bleeding obvious is an abuse of power.

Gordon Brown tries to claim credit for "saving the world", when all he did was to transfer bank losses to the taxpayer. He should simply, when threatened with ATM closure, have underwritten the situation for a month or so, while a team of experts worked out a longer term solution which would have enforced separation of the banks, and redelivered the losses squarely on to those who incurred them.

No doubt electoral panic clouded his judgement. One wonders too if banks which had to bear the brunt of their own losses would have felt equally compelled to go on paying bonuses.