Pointing fingers at the plutocrats

In an extract from his provocative book Who Runs Britain?, Robert Peston looks at the roots of the current financial crisis and blames a political pact with the super-rich for impoverishing the rest of us

When the going was good, investment bankers, hedge fund managers and partners in private-equity firms all did very nicely from the bonuses and the capital gains and the fees generated by the frenetic manufacturing of deal after deal after deal. Many of them are now paying a price for failing to understand the risks they were taking on. Don't weep for them. They have already extracted fortunes.

It is most of us who are paying for their foolhardiness, as the pricking of a financial bubble they created has a negative impact on all our prosperity. Months, possibly years, may go by before banks are prepared to lend as freely as they had been doing. The price of money is going up for all of us, and the economy is slowing down, because regulators and governments did not dare stop the over-exuberant behaviour of greedy traders, bankers and financiers. In fact, the Government encouraged the excesses of these super-rich individuals and their financial servants because they were thought to be good for London and good for Britain. London Telegraph