I can only feel anger at the bankers going bust

Personally, as someone with no belief in the ineluctable character of progress, a deep scepticism about Chancellor Brown's claims to have ended the business cycle, and a contempt for the out-and-out greed of many in the City, I feel I'm long overdue a substantial schadenfreude bonus.

So, all you Gordon and Geraldine Geckos, where has your appetite for risk got you? With Northern Rock costing the British taxpayer a fortune, now Lehman Brothers has gone to the wall and even the mighty Merrill Lynch is sobbing drunkenly in the corner, waiting for the Bank of America to take her home.

All you bankers have had your fat years. Now get ready for some very thin ones. You posed as the engines of economic growth but really you were petrolheads, pure and simple, addicted to the short-term rush provided by speedy profits. You weren't interested in the real viability of companies: you liked takeovers, which made you a killing on stock fluctuations.

Nor did you care about commodities — you simply wanted to bet on their fluctuating prices. And as for property — don't get me started. Some of you gave mortgages to poor people who couldn't afford them; others of you issued bonds against these dud loans; then still more of you traded these fundamentally worthless "assets" with gusto.

Oh, yes, there's schadenfreude aplenty to be enjoyed at the sight of all those wide boys getting narrower by the second and yet hold on a minute: the collapsing property market means that it's the little people who can't get started on the property ladder, and the credit crunch means it's small businesses that can't get the loans they need. And many of the Lehman employees who lost their jobs yesterday weren't that rich.

No, schadenfreude isn't really called for here, not when people are posting their house keys through the door and going on the run because they can't keep up interest payments. What's required is a far stronger emotion: anger. Anger towards those at the top of the heap who went on gambling with other people's futures, and anger towards those in government who were seriously comfortable with the seriously rich — no matter how they made their money.

If only we'd borrowed a few other important concepts from the Germans we might be better placed to weather the storm; concepts such as "social market" and a conservative belief that far from house-price inflation being a good thing, it's a bad one. But we didn't. We preferred to borrow from those so-called Masters of the Universe on Wall Street, so all we're left with is schadenfreude, anger — or in the case of the poor, outright misery.