Extraordinary scenes here in the UK, with a parasitical underclass robbing, torching and looting businesses. But enough of the bankers - why did a segment of Britain's 'lost' urban generation suddenly turn feral ? The comparison between out of control financiers and disaffected violent youths is not merely a tired snipe against our unreconstructed banking class. There are wider social tensions busily simmering away. Perhaps some of the rioters who took to the streets of London, Birmingham and Manchester last week have started to twig that they face a lifetime of higher taxes (if they can get jobs at all) and diminished social services courtesy of decades of swelling "entitlement", the accumulated benefits of the baby-boomers that preceded them, and the damage wrought by self-interested financiers playing at casino capitalism of no social merit whatsoever. Not so much Generation X as Generation Ex: ex-jobs, ex-growth, ex-prospects. We have had politicians pocketing illicit expenses, and bankers trousering unjustifiable bonuses even as the financial system totters at the cliff edge. Is trashing Miss Selfridge really so different ?

The recent involuntary transfer of wealth from western taxpayers to a narrow financial elite has been the largest in the history of the world. Why has nobody rioted over that ? Why has there been, Austrians apart, no questioning or examination of a rotten financial superstructure, in which the ongoing con of central and fractional reserve banking, and unsound fiat money, continues to transfer wealth in real terms from what's left of the productive economy to a bankrupt (in all senses) banking system ? Why does the cult of Keynesian stimulus continue to hold such power over our politicians when it has so obviously and expensively failed? What we get, from mouthpieces of conventional finance such as The Financial Times, is ongoing yellow journalism mocking the "bubble" in gold. This is not just missing the wood for the trees. It is missing the story from the story