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Chris Blackhurst’s article in today’s London Evening Standard is going to make a lot of folk boil with anger. It’s a clever piece of red rag waving. As the City editor of The Daily Mail’s sister paper (and also an MT Contributing Editor), Chris’s brief will have been to get his finger on whatever the reverse of a g-spot is. An aggro-spot, perhaps. He has succeeded admirably.

It paints a picture of a lot of City bankers who may currently have their heads down with some mild shell shock, but who are planning to carry on raking it in pretty much as before - and are markedly lacking in a sense of culpability. 'We’re still having our party,' says one, unnamed source, 'but the age of conspicuous consumption is no longer acceptable in any shape or form'. Another likely lad from Canary Wharf writes off the failure of the US congress to pass the Paulson plan as 'a few Ozark hillbillies venting their spleen'. Then just to rub salt into our painful cuts, Chris reveals that one head-hunter is having to fight with Nomura over Lehman traders: 'Last year someone was earning £500,000. Their bank goes bust and Nomura is saying here’s £600,000 and for two years. They’re better off now than they were under Lehman.'

The implication of this is clear. Although we’re now heading into some pretty miserable times, that misery will be felt far more keenly by the rest of us than by those who have created it. Many of these people are sitting in their £4 million houses in Surrey and Essex with mortgages paid off and enough money stashed away to pay for the school fees and two weeks over Xmas in Courcheval for the next ten years. They’re all right Jack, and bugger the rest of us.

Well, even if this is exactly how it is, I wouldn’t want to be an investment banker at the moment. I’m not sure how secure their futures are even if Paulson’s plan goes through and governments are forced to bail out and guarantee savings until the exchequer is empty. Of course I’d love some of an investment banker’s vast wad of cash, but I’m not sure I could cope with the opprobrium of the public at large. Those in  finance are set to be Public Enemy Number One for some time yet. One level up from axe murderers and paedophiles. The legislators will be out to get them in the traditional cack-handed way, as they seek to curb their remuneration.

Being an Andy Hornby, a Dick Fuld or a mere minor Master of the Canary Wharf Universe is likely to get you punched on the nose at the moment. Even the most battle-hardened and cynical of wall Street types must have been taken aback by the strength of disapproval from Middle America. Over here, if you look at the Telegraph’s website, for example, there is some venomous vitriol (some of it of a very nasty anti-semitic variety) being spewed out by angry US readers. And, as we all enter a chilly economic Winter, that anger is going to take a long time to cool.

In today's bulletin:
PM bets the House on HBOS rescue
Editor's blog: What Moral Hazard?
Royal dressmaker hangs by a thread
How to keep it in the family
Busted bankers fall back on charity