According to Louis xiv's finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert: 'a banker is a soldier in the service of the state.' When, as today, a politician becomes a servant in the bureaucracy of the banking system, the logic is reversed. After a long engagement, the 'fist-in-glove' marriage between banking system and state appears to have been solemnised, in the UK and around the world.

Notwithstanding media commentary to the contrary, it was the role of states, throughout the post-war period, in 'pricing money'  and backstopping the downside that led to the somnambulant financial arrangements by which humanity was lulled into creating fictive assets.

Had there been a separation of money and state, then monetary consciousness would have been spurred , ensuring that financial arrangements stood or fell on their economic merit. Only the principle of depositor / lender / investor be-aware can engender transparent transactions.This facilitates a wakeful interest in counterparty activity, whether on a human level or merely in order to know, in a matter of fact way, how it will give rise to a profit and therefore a dividend. In these circumstances, the idea that money can be 'saved' is seen through, or, at any rate the cost of such an economic illusion is not socialised.

Influential investment adviser Warren Buffet recently said the following: 'funds are abundant for the government-guaranteed borrower but often scarce for others, no matter how creditworthy they may be...Government is determining the 'haves' and 'have-nots.' ... At the moment, it is much better to be a financial cripple with a government guarantee than a Gibraltar without one.'

We must now expect to enter a period of massive statism based on the culture of political gesture and empty phrase; real initiative originating with the insight of individuals will be challenged as never before, as increasingly dirigism becomes the order of the day.

Thus far the rude awakening has not been not for creditors (whose assets could simply have been written down, if honest dealing had prevailed, but will now be devalued through inflation) as much as for tax-payers (who have been made liable for privately incurred debts). In the play-off between banking and political interests, it was the politicians who stood down, both fearing the ramifications of a wipe-out and not fully understanding the nature of the circumstance into which they were drawn.

Humanity would do well to think carefully before it follows in the footsteps of an economic philosophy that put 16,000 small entrepreneurs to death. Our ignorance created the banking crisis, Colbertism would be our folly.

Arthur Edwards

• Making Credit Less Crunchy: 19 Mar / Rudolf Steiner House, London
• The Colours of Money: 3-5 April / Stroud, England
• Inner and Outer Aspects of Associative Economics: 17 May & 21 June / Rudolf Steiner House, London