You have to hand it to retail bankers, when it comes to taking the piss they are in a league of their own. How wonderful it must be to enjoy a set of life rules that run as follows:

1. I take your money and keep it in a safe place. If other people steal it electronically while it’s in my care, it’s not my fault.

2. While it’s in this safe place, I will let you have access to this, your own money, but only on the strict understanding that you pay me every time you want some of it.

3. From time to time, I will steal some of this money (by charging you twice for things and so forth) when you’re not looking. If caught out, I shall smile, recant, and then look for another way to do it – for example, charging you interest on sums you’ve already paid back. You should accept this as standard banking practice and good for the share price.

4. If YOU borrow some money from ME, then falling behind on the payments will allow me to take all your possessions by force, because after all this is Free Market economics, and the weak must fall by the wayside to make way for Time Lords like me.

5. At other times, I will take some or all of your money and invest it in idiot South American jungle-clearance schemes, ocean-going lead colanders, and extensions to gipsy trailers. When all these go tits up, I realise that even I could not possibly ask you (whose money I have squandered) to pay for me, as it were, losing your money entrusted to me for safe-keeping. So I will go to the Bank of England, and they’ll either nationalise me slightly – or, better still – ask the Treasury to give me its money – which, as you know, is money they steal from you every month under their own ingenious money-making scheme, income tax.

6. If a few of my mates get in there before me on the previous scam, I shall have to wait for a bit, and get some of your money (which I lost earlier) back by increasing the cost of YOU borrowing money from ME. I’ll also increase the money I charge you for looking after your money which I’ve blown (these we call ‘bank charges’) and invent new minimums of money for you give to me as liquid cash – while reducing the interest I pay YOU on any further monies you are barmy enough to give me for safe keeping.

7. When you finally wake up and cut up rough about this, the chances are I’ll still be borassic on account of having purchased a Dutch bank for no reason other than it having been ludicrously overpriced. So then and only then will I come cap in hand to you and present my need for eight billion quid as a once-in-a-lifetime golden opportunity rights issue chance for you to chuck your already heavily taxed good money after my only very slightly taxed bad – which as those paying attention will know, was never my money in the first place.

8. If the scheme at point 7 doesn’t pan out, I shall go back to point 5 and start again.

9. Whatever happens, none of this will have been my fault, but merely a result of the impossible to foresee and serendipitous events that happen to Masters of the Universe as we sail the seven Galaxies of the Financial Universe making your money work harder for us.

10. Should any fingers be inappropriately pointed, I will feel it my duty to resign with an £800,000 payoff, and state yet again that we bankers are far too regulated. If only those ghastly FSA snoopers didn’t keep interfering, none of this credit crunchy stuff would happen in the first place. Or rather it would, but you wouldn’t know about it. And we bankers don’t believe in worrying you, the sovereign customer, needlessly.

11. If the Bank of England won’t give us any more of your money directly as it were, then we march to Ten Downing St and say ‘Look fatty, there’s a problem here – for quite obvious reasons we’re not lending our own money to each other, so it’s up to you to let us borrow your money….how about slipping us some risk-free bonds? We’d be quite happy to risk that, because it’s not our money – do you follow old boy?’