It’s official now that the big papers say it’s true. Our savings are caught somewhere between worth less and worthless.

What a funny old world we live in. One day meltdown means the icecaps, the next it refers to the global finance system. How much bad news can a koala bear?

Getting back to basics, the three vital requirements for the future are: a healthy environment, functioning infrastructure and stored wealth. Well, the plants and trees are still there, not as many as we need, but they are doing the best they can as the lungs of the planet.

Likewise our infrastructure, paid for as it was, by previous generations of taxpayers far more frugal than we are encouraged to be, is holding up reasonably well.

OK, so we can see the trees and the trains, but where is the stored wealth? Where exactly are our superannuation funds, our savings, our future fund and the value of our shares?

The reality is that all stored wealth is an act of faith. We entrust the financial institutions with our nest eggs on the understanding that they will use the money wisely and give us a return on our investment that’s better than sticking it under the mattress.

In the classic capitalist model, this ‘loaned’ wealth is used to invest in new ventures, which in turn provide a healthy return on investment and thus the whole band wagon rolls fearlessly onwards.

Unfortunately the privateers and the buccaneers have rorted the system to the point of collapse. Vast amounts of money have been siphoned from the pool of stored wealth by shonksters ‘earning’ huge commissions by merely transferring piles of money from one stack to another.

As well of course, money has no absolute value. If we all queued at the bank to get our savings in cash there would be less than fifteen cents in every dollar available. This figure is going down daily.

What interesting times in which to live. Not so long ago it was religious extremist-fuelled terrorism that was the greatest threat to our security. A couple of headlines later it was global warming. Today it’s the meltdown of the market.

With a bit of luck, capitalism will not suddenly disintegrate into unmanageable social unrest. But we should heed the warning.

Communities will need to be stronger and more focussed on securing outcomes that benefit people. It is, after all said and done, people creating added value by working that is the source of all wealth.

As individuals and as communities we have assets both tangible and as articles of faith in financial institutions. It’s up to us to get the balance right. A bank of solar collectors on the roof for a household, or a modern public transport system for a community, may prove to be a safer investment for the future than credit in a superannuation fund.

Careless consumerism has brought us to a point where we must face up to our responsibilities, both economically and environmentally. But we are going to make it.

Hopefully, the motto for the twenty-first century will be, “people before profit”.