Will Hutton is on the money.

The availability of credit is one of the fundamental pillars of any economic system. Like the delivery of gas, electricity and water, finance should be regarded as a utility and after the credit-crunch disasters of the 1930s, following the free-market 1920s, it was regulated as one. But Anglo-American financiers have used the theories of the free-market fundamentalists to argue that it should be liberated from such regulatory ’shackles’ and again run as a business like any other.

Yet finance is not like any other business. When a bank makes a mistake, the ramifications for the rest of the financial and economic system are so severe that it has to be bailed out — witness Northern Rock. Because of this truth, financiers have organised themselves so that actual or potential losses are picked up by somebody else — if not their clients, then the state — while profits are kept to themselves. An industry that socialises losses while privatising profit, and that has the capacity to create booms and busts alike, has to be as closely regulated as any utility.