Not all that trillion is ill-spent.The money culture makes you wary of any kind of forecasting. Writing about Hollywood film-making, the ultimate capitalist enterprise, the scriptwriter William Goldman said: “Nobody knows anything” – meaning there’s no way to tell which film will hit the jackpot Most other forecasting is just as dubious. You constantly read, for example, about a pensions “black hole”. Supposedly, there won’t be enough working people in the population to pay benefits to the increasing numbers of the elderly. But one thing is indisputable in the murky world of social statistics: all demographic forecasts are wrong.

At one time it seemed as if the old “mutual” companies like Equitable Life and Standard Life – supposedly run on high ethical principles, with faint echoes of the co-operative movement’s Rochdale Pioneers – were the best guardians of the future Not so It turned out they were run all too much like the Co-op Equitable Life crashed spectacularly. Even George Orwell was guilty of this in his Thirties novel Coming Up for Air, in which every suburban avenue, every building society mortgage, was derided as an assault on the England he knew and loved. The same attitudes continue, expressed just as often among those who dress on the left politically as among those who dress on the right. People were – and still are, by the Government – advised to put money into pension schemes But the experience of actual pensions schemes is dire.

And also, what better way is there for them to erect a defence against the sharkish side of the money culture?All the other defences are full of holes. Why, they mutter, can’t all these people be happy enough with smaller places, preferably rented and built on inner-city “brownfield” land, as laid down by so many teams of planning advisers?Well, why should they be content with less? No one else is. But financial triumphs like Ritblat’s only re-emphasise the widespread British suspicion that the only lasting way to make money in this country is though bricks and mortar There’s nothing novel about this preoccupation History is not mocked. A lot of it has gone into buying property, as in the old Abbey National building society’s logo of a couple striding happily along, with a little roof poised over their heads, like an eternal umbrella This British preoccupation is routinely deplored Some of the hand-wringing, as always, is covert snobbery.

A lesson in how to lord it.Much of our £1,000,000,000,000 hasn’t gone into credit card debt. Self-exiled in New York, John Lennon, former rebel, took his un-American preoccupations with him as he and his wife set about trying to buy up all the apartments in the prestigious Dakota Building, where they lived That was a dream of real grandeur. Even “new money” in Britain has always striven to build itself into the social hierarchy by buying land (see any Trollope novel).American plutocrats, by contrast, are often happy enough with stocks and shares. When the Abbey bank last week decided to turn itself into Abbey Hispanic, the chief operating officer, Stephen Hester, jumped ship and took an immediate £600,000 a year job with Ritblat.Wise man, you might say. On BBC television, one of the stars of the ten o’clock news is Jeff Randall, the business editor, snapping out wisecracks like a Jack Russell terrier as he explains the latest takeover-bid battle or the sad decline of Sainsbury’s and Marks & Spencer.But more news isn’t always good news. Though more people may be, in a general sense, money-minded, not many have the conceptual grasp of how to handle money – and make it grow. Few have prospered, for example, like John Ritblat,chairman of British Land, which is reported to be the largest property company listed on the stock market.