There is a common conception of the rogues from the banking world and their equally unfavourable brothers from the hedge fund community as gaudy, arrogant, and overpaid. All are credited with a well established ability to go spectacularly astray in markets of their own invention, lend money that doesn’t exist and refuse to accept responsibility for damage wrought on the wider community – all vices fuelled by an appetite, come what may, for gross personal rewards. But it’s getting boring arguing with ostensibly sensible friends who laugh that it is good news that many of Lehman Brothers’ 25,000 have lost their jobs overnight and no jobs in the financial sector are safe. I don’t think that’s funny, and it’s painful to watch.

A friend was standing outside Costa on London’s Kings Road last month. She recalls the literally wailing women in Chanel coats clutching keys to Mercedes Benz. They are watching breaking news on the corner television and dropping their super slim chai tea lattes in chorus; it has just been announced that Lehman Brothers is no more. Their husbands and sons, sisters and daughters are – were – investment bankers. They notice for the first time that the price of their coffee is over three euros. At first it is hard to sympathise. But their friends and relatives have suddenly joined Europe’s increasing number of highly skilled unemployed, with bleak job prospects for the near future. Worse still is that for many, every penny earned in the last ten or twenty years of sixteen-hour days in the office was reinvested into the firms’ now worthless shares. The houses in Chelsea and chalets in St Moritz, their investments as well as luxuries, are fast losing value and the payment date for their kids’ private school fees looms.

There are literally tens of thousands of hardworking individuals within banking, who are in no way responsible, but could suffer with the loss of their jobs

For ninety-five percent of the Western world, fee-paying schools and second homes aren’t even an option. So why should we feel sorry for those who have been knocked from their sky-high stools to the perfectly comfortable cushions on the floor like the rest of us? “Capitalism has got its comeuppance,” Jarvis Cocker said the other day. And he is certainly not alone in his derision. Nick Clegg, the British Liberal Democrat leader, basked in applause after pouring contempt on the “City boys” who had made more money than him. The public is gripped by a gleeful and ugly schadenfreude. For one, it is these bankers who are largely responsible for turning Britain, amongst others, into a global economic power. They filled the restaurants, funded the academies, bought the art and employed the builders. For the last two decades investment banking has attracted the cream of business graduates. The brightest, most ambitious and hardworking students left top universities and entered the City. Since then, their weeks have merged together and their wives and children have traded weekend trips and family meals for deeper pockets. It is the greed of just a few unscrupulous cowboys, who feverishly grasped at even higher short-term profits and who lent so unwisely, which has left so many high and dry. John O’Hagan, a Professor of Economics here in Trinity, commented that “there are tens of thousands of hardworking individuals within banking, who are in no way responsible, but could suffer with their jobs”. And let’s not forget the cleaners, secretaries, post-room men and drivers who are in an equally unstable position and who have never enjoyed stratospheric salaries and daily liquid lunches.

I am not condoning banks’ excesses. Lloyd Blankfein’s (of Goldman Sachs) $68.5 million earnings last year were completely ridiculous and I don’t doubt there should be a far more transparent correlation between performance and bonuses. But we should remember why these banks originated. They are there to make profits for investors, most of whom are not the demons they are made out to be but ordinary workers who choose to put their surplus family income into stocks and shares in the hope of a reasonable return.

An ex-Lehman Brothers worker told me yesterday of the “absolute shock” of his former employer’s bankruptcy: “We were expecting it to be taken over!” Though she blames the CEO, Dick Fuld for the collapse of the bank, she said “it is the subprime mortgage stuff that started the current crisis”.

She only took a role in the firm because her colleagues during her internship were “so likeable, just really, really great, hardworking, intelligent people”. Most of whom are now struggling to find replacement jobs, are married with children and mortgages and “lots of their money was tied up in share options…which dissolved to basically nothing. It’s very sad.”

It seems to me very short sighted to revel in a delicious retribution. The majority of these people were just doing their jobs. Perhaps it is the direction and method of investment that needs to change.

A few ravenous managers gambled at unprecedented stakes, often with the personal security of a plump corporate pension should things take a turn for the worst. We should return to the days of low-risk betting, with more modest profits but less chance of the economic disaster we find ourselves victim to now.