All was weirdly calm in the Firefly office whilst the city was collapsing a couple of miles East.
So what's the impact on us?

Well, if you look at the photo in Metro (right) you can just make out a bottle of "Sharpen up" on the desk by the oh-so-ironic jacket. Yes, the Lehman canteen was one of our top customers. "Bankers love Firefly" shocker.

Even the bankers admit that something's amiss when 4 people I know (3 of them under 35) earned £8-figures last year, without risking their own money. That's a serious fortune. In one year. And I don't exactly hang out in banking circles. So where's all that cash coming from?

Well, as I see it, there are two things going on.
First, in the same way that a 9-person company like Firefly can sell drinks in 40 countries, a 20-person hedge-fund can now handle billions of dollars of funds. Technology can do all those things like research, settlement, risk-management, who-knows-what, that white-collar armies used to do. So the management fees go straight to the "talent" at the top. And with commodities soaring, shares volatile and insider-trading largely unchallenged, big bets mean plenty of big wins and big pay-outs.

Secondly, all this money was being passed around, with someone taking a little cut here, and a little cut there - so when you try and pay back the money after all those little cuts, you find there's a chunk missing.
Please help me if I'm being stupid here: I take out a mortgage (little cut to the broker or mortgage salesman), that gets packaged up and sold to a merchant bank (little cut), on which they issue "securities" (ha ha),(little cut) which then get traded (little cut) like shares. Now, mortgages aren't a high-margin business. Mine's fixed at Base + 0.18% for 20 years. I'm amazed that's enough to keep my mortgage company in business, let alone all these other clever people earning big bonuses.
Now we all know that half of those mortgages were bogus, sub-prime blah blah. But even if they hadn't been, wouldn't we have found that there was a black hole where the bonuses had all come from? It'd be a bit like if we made our drinks, sold them on to a distributor (little cut), who sold them to a retailer (little cut), who sold them to the public (little cut) - but the public had the right to sell them back to us at our cost price. Um, help, call the Federal Reserve.
It's just bonkers. Surely you have to "add value" to justify adding a margin. How are these people "adding value" to my mortgage?

So what next?
Well, Britain is more "unequal" than at any time since they started measuring Gini coefficients in 1961. And that's mainly the top 1% racing ahead faster than ever.
Is that bad?
It's bad if it makes hard-working people feel there's no point, because they'll always be in a different league from the super-rich. And it's particularly bad if it's seen to be unfair: not talent and hard work - just luck, creative accounting or bordering-on-insider trading.
But the ultimate "bad", surely, would be to see the government - the taxpaying middle-classes - pour more cash into the elite's bulging pockets by propping up their institutions.
I'm no historian, but it all sounds a bit like pre-revolutionary France.

Meanwhile, back at Firefly HQ, better find some new "Sharpen up" fans.