In this fallen world most of us cannot count on a steady stream of income year in and year out. Instead we must earn our bread by the sweat of our brows. Some years we earn more and some years we earn less and some of the rises and falls in our income are easily predictable.

Because our earning abilities are uneven through our lives we need to save and borrow. When we are young we often consume more than we earn - student loans and payments from the parents. In our prime we try to earn more than we consume and put by savings for our later years - our fast vanishing 401k plans.

We might turn our savings into money and stuff them in a mattress or bury them in the back yard. Alas this would be a bad things for society and for us as individuals. Capital markets exist to take our savings - our unused claims on society's output - and direct them to others who will use our claims for consumption or to invest in useful and profitable projects.

As lenders we should get reasonably secure claims that we can cash in at some future date for some amount greater than our original investments. Borrowers get the current use of our claims on output at some reasonable rate of interest. Financiers, who organize and run the market get large salaries, fat bonuses and corporate jets. Everybody wins.

Except that, over the past decade, savers have mostly seen zero of negative returns on the money that they put into the capital markets - see Floyd Norris on the stock market here -  while borrowers have been paying rather high interest rates - check out your student loans and your mortgage.

In the meantime capital markets did get the salaries, bonuses and corporate jets part right.

And now, after making a hopeless tangle of things and blowing off a great part of our savings in various bubbles, our financial titans appear, hat in hand, asking us to mortgage our futures further to get them back on their feet. If we do this they promise that, at some future point, after we have paid for all of our excesses and brought national income and consumption back to the levels that the likes of us deserve, they will once again consent to channel our savings to investors of their choice - provided they can make sufficient profits on the transactions.

In the meantime we need to shut up write out some more checks and take our medicine. And please don't even think of using your savings to finance government spending because that would discourage investment.

Or, more to the point, that would break their current monopoly on society's savings.