An end to bullshit?

But banking is also risky. Without trust, it doesn’t work. If all customers want their money back at the same time, the system collapses. It also collapses if bankers take excessive risks.

Recent financial events — including the problems at Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, AIG and HBOS — have shown that many bankers can’t be trusted. They are arrogant and greedy.

When things get tough, these bankers run home to mummy and daddy (the government) and ask for more pocket money. Ideally, mummy and daddy would always say “no”, as with Lehman Brothers. Sometimes — as with Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae and AIG — they can’t, because too many other people would get hurt.

But as Marton Wolf, a columnist for the Financial Times and supporter of globablization wrote recently of the US government: “It can ... spare us homilies on the sacred role of free markets for a long while.”

A homily is “a tedious moralizing lecture”, says the Oxford Dictionary of English. In other words, the sort of bullshit that free-market extremists — bankers and right-wing economists — have bored us with for years.

One positive result of the financial crisis will be that the free-market bullshitters will have to argue against each case of state intervention pragmatically. Their “free markets are best” mantra is not enough: free markets are often a good thing, but not always .

“Trust me, I’m a banker.” Er, will you excuse me if I don’t?