This should be a great opportunity for a satirical business writer to poke fun at the obvious irony of the whole situation. For instance, there is plenty of comic material in the lack of sympathy that bankers will get when they find out they are only going to get six-figure bonuses this year.

 

And there are hundreds of tongue-in-cheek human interest stories to tell about investment bankers having the misfortune of not being able to renovate their Manhattan apartments or their condos in Vail this year.

Yes, this would all be funny stuff, in a tragic kind of way, if it weren't for the fact that these bankers have taken half the finance industry down with them. Watching my investment portfolio disappear, wondering if my own bank will be next to go, doesn't put me in the mood to laugh.

I am, of course, not the only one wondering if my bank will be next to go. It is difficult for anyone to feel very comfortable at the moment, and there is not much anyone can do about it.

Any day now, I am expecting a "Dear All" e-mail from management assuring us that despite the dreadful things that have happened to some of our competitors, we do not have a liquidity problem. Trouble is, it seems to be standard procedure that shortly before a bank collapses or gets bought out, management reassures everyone that they don't have a liquidity problem.

CEOs and bank management, of course, will always say there is no problem. So hearing a CEO say everything is fine isn't particularly comforting. Banking is a lot about confidence, and no CEO is going to do anything to reduce anyone's confidence in their bank. That means even the bankers are starting to wonder what to believe.

And so, for the first time in a while, bankers have to do something that they really aren't accustomed to doing: they have to start worrying about their jobs.

Watching on TV as people walk out of bank office buildings carrying cardboard boxes is not something a lot of us were really prepared for. For as long as I can remember, if I wasn't happy about something - or if the bank wasn't happy about me - I could just walk across the street and go work for some other bank. Not today. Today I am in the unusual position of being glad to have a job.

Once upon a time, my fantasy was to get laid off, cash in my share options, and go retire in some tropical paradise. Now my fantasy is that the market stabilises, my stocks stop losing money, and that I still have a job in 12 months' time. Not that exciting as fantasies go, I know, but it's head and shoulders above today's reality.

To cope with this, what a lot of us are doing is knuckling down, working harder than usual to demonstrate our value to management, and making sure that we're in a position to justify our value to any new management team that might turn up.

What we are also doing is waiting for the inevitable cost-cutting. Business-class flights, five-star hotels, staff lunches, off-sites, not to mention bonuses and pay rises. And why do I have to suffer all this? Because the biggest and brightest and best-paid names in finance didn't know when to stop.

So, what I really want to do now is write a vitriolic column about how completely brain-dead all the great financial minds were that led us into this situation. I want to hand out some blame and watch the investigators go after these guys the way the Enron executives were brought to their knees. But the Enron staff never got their savings back, and getting angry at people I have never met is not going to help the Hang Seng Index recover.

So this is what I'm going to do instead. I'm going to tell you what the future is going to be. More banks will collapse. Stock markets will continue to bounce around uncontrollably. Finance will continue to flow like molasses.

And then one day, we'll all wake up in the morning and the US markets will have rallied overnight for no apparent reason. And then the rest of the world will do the same and the people on TV will start saying that the crisis is over. And when enough people start saying that it's over, then it really will be. Banks will start hiring and we'll all start piling into the rising stock markets. Borrowing will get easier and easier and we'll all start getting wealthier and wealthier. We will all be full of confidence again and we'll all buy new cars and move into larger flats and the current situation will all fade from memory. And this will all last ... until the next bubble bursts.