Capitalism today is like a gigantic fiscal blancmange, wobbling precariously but shedding sufficient tidbits to keep enough people happy.

The race to the bottom line though, has taken the marketeers to their worst ethical standards ever. The holy grail of competitive edge ensures that only the lowest common denominator survives.

Take ‘short selling’ as an example of where the market’s heading. This is where you borrow shares from your broker, sell them at today’s price, gamble on their value dropping, so that when you actually buy them later on to pay back the broker, you’ve made a profit on the deal.

Isn’t that something? Even as some of our best-known institutions go down the gurgler, the traders have figured out a way to make a buck from everyone else’s loss.

It’s a bit of a worry. A lot of people are counting on their shares, savings, super funds and pension schemes, but these exist as market faith and have no absolute value.

Have a read of the finance pages every now and then. Ignore the detail, as the guru said in ‘Star Wars’, “Just feel the force Luke, feel the force”.

Force or farce, that’s the question. The finance sector is fast becoming a pig’s breakfast of trough-snouting and mucking about wildly with bacon eating bacon.

As executive salaries soar towards the stratosphere, defenders of the faith tell us that if the shareholders don’t like it, they can vote the pay increases down at the next AGM.

But they can’t. The modern large company is carefully inter-connected with other institutions via blocks of shareholdings and is quite immune from protestations or suggestions from the little bloke.

It is important to remember from whence all wealth comes.

We whistle our way merrily off to work each day and get paid somewhat less than the full value of our labour. The other bit, the ‘surplus value’ drifts off into profit voodoo land where it might morph into a margin call or a derivative, or a couple of rivets on the hull of a luxury yacht.

Wealth also comes from exploiting natural resources. We haven’t even got past ‘finders keepers’ as a national resource strategy so we’re not doing as well as some countries.

Dazzling us with royalty trinkets, the mining companies are denuding the ancient wealth of this continent with breathless haste. The resource industry has no interest in moderation or much concern for the long-term picture.

It is advanced technological infrastructure in a sustainable environment that we must have to create a worthwhile future. The market is important but in terms of human survival it’s a sideshow.

Unlike the value of money, the environment has an absolute worth. The earth we sow, the air we breathe, the water with which the plants grow; this is the only balance sheet with any true meaning.