What does the financial services industry do for us? Answer: Zilch.

“One expert, formerly an investment banker who lived through the good times and got out of the City before the decline, says: ‘The financial services business has failed the three basic tests – fund management returns are falling, mergers and acquisitions have been shown not to work, analysts’ forecasts nearly always turn out to be wrong. How can they claim to have added any value to the well-being of the nation after all that? It’s a bloody scandal.’ ” Frank Kane on Britain’s rip-off financial services industry.