There are sites around the world devoted entirely to putting Goldman Sachs down. My own view is that much of what the bank does is, on any objectively ethical basis, sharp practice. I have friends in the US who would say the bank’s blunt practice (for example, during the Lehman collapse) is the truly evil element in its behaviour; but leaving that aside, the SEC hopes to prove a conspiracy of quite some enormity.

In every sphere of business, it’s a fine line that separates skilled practice from fraud. A marketing campaign suggesting a higher price drop than really exists may still represent very good value for the consumer. And a multivariate bank may produce a product in one division antithetical to another…yet serve both client sets well. As always, it comes down to a sense of honour and proportion. I would argue, for instance, that Tesco lacks a fair sense of proportion, and displays little in the way of genuine honour. But the SEC is trying to prove that what Goldman Sachs did was indisputably dishonourable and disproportionally greedy – such that it broke the law and stitched up one half (the most needy half) of its client base.

In a nutshell, the Securities & Exchange Commission seeks to show that Goldmans conspired to produce a sub-prime mortgage package they knew would fail in order to benefit those mega-rich private clients keen to carpet-bag what was left of the market when it all went belly-up. This is going to be one helluva difficult thing to prove in Court: small wonder that the accused bank has already issued a statement asserting that the charges ‘have no basis in law’. This sounds to me like an organisation that has already taken expensively encouraging advice about its defence.

Of course, crooked financiers always begin press releases in such circumstances with a pledge to ‘vigorously oppose’ charges – and today Goldman Sachs used those exact words. Having traced the actions of its various divisions from time to time, there is no doubt in my mind that it is quite capable of such psychopathic conspiracy to defraud. But we are talking here about actions that may have been decisive in very nearly bringing down the whole Global financial system -purely for its own ends. It’s the sort of stuff that makes JFK assassination scenarios seem small-fry by comparison.

As standards of behaviour erode and degrade right across the western world, life has truly begun to imitate even the most loopy form of conspiracy theory. In 1972 in the US, I dismissed ideas of Nixon’s personal involvement in Watergate as just more ramblings from the paranoid student Left. When the Catholic church’s problems with child abuse first came to light, the year before last, I found talk of things leading back to the Vatican distasteful. But the last six years have taught me that the world is full of mad, cunning people. Even worse, they have taught me that the more patronising and laid-back the denial, the more likely that the charges are true. This is not good for our governmental systems – for if they are not trustworthy, then they are nothing.

I remain convinced that most bad stuff is the result of cowardice and incompetence, not conspiracy. But if the SEC proves its case against Goldman Sachs, then all bets are off.