Mary Dejevsky: Work hard? Play by the rules? You're a loser...

Maybe it is the scale of it; maybe the sense that an extreme American mutation of capitalism is finally getting its come-uppance. Maybe it is that no one here in Britain – except a few unfortunate Northern Rock shareholders – has yet actually lost any hard cash.

Whatever mitigating factors there might be, though, I simply cannot understand the abject public passivity towards what is tamely called the global credit crunch. For myself, I am mad, furious, as utterly, carpet-chewingly livid as I was about Tony Blair's arrogance in signing us up to Iraq. And so should you be. It is your livelihood, your security, your future that is being flushed away with those worthless American mortgage papers.

Almost 10 years have passed since Bill Clinton defined the modern social contract in terms every one of his fellow citizens could understand. "The main idea," he said, "is still the old idea of the American dream... that if you work hard and play by the rules, you ought to have a decent life and a chance for your children to have a better one." Such a contract is common to every civilised country. Over the past year it has been fed progressively into the corporate shredder.

Let's try getting back to basics. Just as there is no such thing as a victimless crime, there is no crime without a culprit. And the culprits in this case are the financial wizards who persuaded themselves that risk could be chopped into ever tinier pieces, to the point where it seemed conveniently to vanish. The culprits are also the regulators who allowed them to get away with it. And they are the governments that embraced easy credit as a generator of economic growth, and then boasted to more prudent counterparts – the eurozone countries, Japan – about the superiority of their "model".

Not one of these culprits – individually, collectively or institutionally – however, is going to take the rap. Oh yes, there have been resignations among the financial wizards, and there will be more – softened, of course, by generous pay-offs, but no penalty to trouble the sleep of those who made their fortunes in the good times. They converted their risk to security long ago; their luxury lifestyles are inviolate. As for the regulators, we can demand they change their ways, and we can – when an election is finally to be postponed no longer - vote a feckless government out, and briefly feel better as a result.

In the end, though, it will make no difference. Because – as becomes more obvious by the day – the debts the financiers ran up without a trace are simply too big to be repaid by anyone remotely responsible. They will pass from private to public sector, and from one government to the next. And then? It is those millions who work hard and play by the rules who will find ourselves picking up the tab.

And we will have no choice but to do so. In Britain now we each hold a fragment of the insolvent Northern Rock; no one asked us whether we wanted it. Any new losses sustained by the state will be passed on to us in higher taxes or national insurance. Borrowers or savers, the credit squeeze traps us both ways. Successive governments encouraged us to become home-owners. For those wanting to take out or renew a mortgage, less available credit means tougher conditions and higher interest rates.

Meanwhile, savers are squeezed from the other side by a government that needs to hold interest rates down in the hope that consumer spending can keep the economy growing. As for those private pensions successive governments have compelled us to take out, the coincidence of poor savings rates and a plunging stock market – a freak combination supposedly – threatens to leave forty- and fiftysomethings with nothing to retire on. More and more will be cast on the mercy of the state.

Among the few beneficiaries of this generalised catastrophe might be first-time homebuyers with a good credit record who could be priced back into a falling housing market. At best, we could be looking at a more sober approach to credit than the one that has prevailed for a decade – and, incidentally, helped fuel those outrageous house prices in the first place. At worst, though, we could be looking at a destructive stand-off between the prudent and the profligate.

Unjust though it might seem to the prudent, a government that still sees credit as a major engine for growth and growth as the sole gauge of economic success, is bound to be in league with the profligate. No British government could accept the level of destitution from foreclosed mortgages that a US government would tolerate. So there will be bail-outs for the improvident or unlucky, including perhaps a right for them to sue their lender for "mis-selling".

And so the infernal cycle will go on: more compensation, more public money, more efforts to restore the credentials of credit – and more calls on those who worked hard and thought they were playing by the rules. Who will join me in Whitehall under my banner?

m.dejevsky@independent.co.uk