If like so many others right now you want a definitive answer to the question 'Who caused the crash of 2008?', then I and I alone can furnish the answer: it was the last but one Roman Emperor, Julius Nepos. Didn't 'ave no bottle, see? Only let in the Hun barbarians and made one his C-in-C dinnee, I mean what was 'e like?

The furry barbarian concerned was one Orestes, a close relative of sensitive intellectual and serial King-impaler Attila the Hun. While not personally responsible for the final collapse of the Roman Empire (already divided in two, and riven by civil war) the Hun-in-Gaul Orestes was probably the first German to actually win an away tie with Roma. And from there on, it was downhill all the way.

You see, this was the origin of German neurotic overconfidence. Orestes' appointment was a tacit acceptance of Roman defeat, something unthinkable in an empire that had seen off Victor Mature, Liz Taylor and Kirk Douglas over the years. But the overconfidence was (just like with fund managers really) entirely unwarranted. Over the next few hundred years, the various tribes of Hun and Allemans went south, east and west in order to keep on proving to the neurotic German mind that they could still 'do it'.

The doing thing largely involved chopping up renegade Romans and raping Gauls, and as this sort of activity is difficult to keep in the hobby cupboard, the products of Orestes' hyperactive loins never quite got round to establishing a place answering to the name of Germany. It's not commonly understood, but there was actually no such thing as a regular team called Germany United until the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Thus as Manchester United used to be called Newton Heath, Deutschland had been a hotch-potch of Bavaria and Prussia along with bits of Poland, France and Czechoslovakia. They may have had Wittgenstein, Hegel, Engels and Wagner, but only the last of these thought of himself as German.

Look, be patient: this is all relevant. You see, added to the bully's inferiority complex was annoyance at the fact that by 1890, France, Spain, Britain and even Austria had empires of mind-boggling size, but despite easily holding the invasion record in pre-Mediaeval Europe, the new Germany had nothing called German West Sussex. Kaiser Wilhelm I - and calling yourself Kaiser (Caesar) does suggest an expansive nature - was the first unified German monarch to become truly miffed about this. He hired the Iron Chancellor Bismarck to get tougher with foreigners and organise a proper arms race, as a result of which by 1906 Germany had a navy so large there weren't enough home ports to contain it, and an untold numbers of soldiers in spiky helmets hauling big guns about. The field-guns were called things like Bertha and Brunhilde, a fact which inspired Wagner to write noisy operas featuring enormous women with voices capable of shattering eardrums beyond the visible horizon.

But fear of the PM's popularity had caused Wilhelm to fire Bismarck long before this. Wilhelm II took over - he being made pretty much of the same stuff - and immediately started causing incidents. Incidents took up most of European history after 1900 until the inevitable four-year bout of fisticuffs began in 1914. There was even an incident at Algeciras - which, however you look at it, is a long, long way from Germany. In fact without question, all this gunboat-throttling was simply a continuation of the over-confident but rather disorganised desire to keep shouting 'Fight! Fight!'. And this trend was given the original oxygen of irritability by the abject weakness and naivety of Julius Nepos.

Now all this need for expensive weaponry rapidly made bankers very important indeed. Before long there were Rothschilds and Banks of England - and because the First World War had used up all its money, Germany rapidly set to printing more of the stuff. In doing so they invented inflation, easily the most enduring German contribution to European culture during the Twentieth Century. Not only did this allow bankers to warn everyone forever about the evils of inflation and giving anyone but them access to money, it also allowed Adolf Hitler to persuade the Reichstag he could solve it by building autobahns and burning the Reichstag.

Adolf was apoplectic that another thirty years on, not only had Germany got no bigger, but the only colony picked up had been given to the British after 1918. He insisted on the need for more living rooms, and to help him afford them, Hitler quickly hired his own banker (you should be detecting a trend by now) Hjalmar Schacht. Having spotted the flaw in the money/printing machines relationship, Schacht turned to two other banking ruses, borrowing and stealing. But once the German-Jewish money, Austria and Czechoslovakia had been pilfered, Schacht's fuhrer had his eye on the new 1939 model Messerschmidt V8 Blitzkrieg. And as invading more places meant (a) doing bully-stuff in the genes since 467 AD (b) writing off loans borrowed from the invaded countries and (c) being able to steal more money (Jewish or otherwise) the Second World War began.

Rather than do the goal-hanging act so successful for them in the first punch-up, this time the Americans got dragged into the melee relatively early on. Hitler's success in amassing almost all the money in Europe led to the USA first of all spending trillions of dollars kitting out John Wayne and finding Private Ryan, and then giving Europe even more greenbacks afterwards thanks to the public benificence of US foreign affairs supremo Marshall. All this lending might have meant emptying Fort Knox of its gold bars, but lending and borrowing are words that immediately suggest 'banking'. So the private funding of men with names like Rothschild, Morgan, Lehman, Bears, Stern and so forth helped to bankroll the Marshall Plan, thus adding America to the long list of countries who had a mortgage with Wall, Street, City & Partners.

This was a lucky bounce for the banks, who'd been in President Roosevelt's bad books since the 1929 Crash, when (spookily enough) lots of traders, bankers and fund managers had thought stock prices could only keep going up and up and up. As this destroyed American agriculture and industry for a decade, bankers had to diversify out of lending and into foreclosing. But their second stroke of luck came in 1945 when FDR died, and the Soviet Union decided to liberate and protect the former German conquests by hanging onto them.

Now had it not been for Julius and Orestes and Kaisers and Bismarcks and Fuhrers and Lebensraum, none of this would have happened. At the last gasp, had Adolf been able to take defeat like a man (as opposed to taking his life) the Russians would probably have stayed their side of the Urals. But instead, he shot himself - and by this time, the Soviet army was in Berlin.

The Cold War between the US and USSR began, requiring so many nuclear missiles to be built that the bill for all of it could be seen from outer space. And - like borrowing and lending - 'big bill' is a result intimately associated with banking. The core business of Wall Street was back on song, and at this point in the story - the baton of blame having been passed from Rome to Germany - we can almost leave both behind, and allow the Masters of the Universe we know and love today to take over the last four hundred metres.

The 'almost' refers to Adolf Hitler's final bequest to contemporary life - the European Economic Community. For the French had a cunning plan: after endless German invasions, they decided a judicious mixture of guilt and economic bonhommie was the best way to cure Hun aggressiveness for good. Not only did this 'give them too much to lose' strategy work a treat, the guilt shtick allowed French farmers to take the piss for over forty years. But crucially, it cemented in the European mind the idea of a united Europe - so much so, that even the British after 1963 decided to try and join in.

This was the ultimate Christmas Day for bankers, who could now add a European Central Bank to the US Federal Reserve, The Bank of England, and Moskow Norodny. Furthermore, they correctly foresaw that the EEC would one day morph into the biggest deficit gravy-train in the history of the world. Deficits mean borrowing, and borrowing means bankers. Borrowing on an Olympic scale in Britain meant yet more power to the banking elbow in the early 1970s, and allowed the IMF by 1975 to start dictating to a national government openly for the first time. These were heady years indeed.

The flaw in the plan was that Governments were by now borrowing so much, there were doubts about whether they really had any serious intention of fulfilling the pay-it-back part of the process. Mexicans and all variety of Africans eventually decided to default on their bank loans. This isn't good for banks, because borrowing and lending really have to be joined at the hip. If people can't borrow any more, then banks can't lend any more. There were also disturbing signs that men in dresses with Arab names had so much money of their own, the last thing they needed was banks. But worse was to follow, as a tertiary dementia patient became US President and then a Mad Handbag took over Britain. And these people kept saying that one should neither a borrower nor a lender be: that the way forward was fiscal frugality and personal thrift and working harder. Governments must do less and spend less, and thus not care less.

Throughout the banks of the world, smelling salts had to be liberally applied.

Thankfully, President Alzheimers and Prime Minister Snatcher were lying about thrift. Or at least, their thrift. So while all the budgets aimed at helping poor folks were immediately saved, Contra deals and Argie-bashing proved very expensive. But more to the point, government borrowing was simply replaced by personal buying and borrowing: and this process was made even easier by two things. First, the recent invention of plastic debt - an ingenious method of payment whereby no real currency notes as such left one's hands at all, but the bank's charged interest rates of which they had hitherto only dreamed during masturbation. And second, the Government in the UK sold off everything it owned, inviting electors to pay for this auction by bidding for shares, houses and anything in a car boot.

In short, governments would no longer print money: the licence would pass to banks. And because no banker in history ever accepted a gift horse without first of all trying to get four, Wall Street and the City said 'no money licence without deregulation'. There was then an enormous bang, after which real and illusory swapped roles. Anything was now possible: Saatchi & Saatchi could rule the world, building societies could become global giants, house prices would keep going up while interest would keep coming down, greedy plasterers waving wads of banknotes would allow some to trickle down to the poor, ethically bereft bankers would become saintly and never again blot copybooks - and above all, if governments could get elected by doing less and less, one day it would be possible for them to get reelected by doing absolutely nothing at all.

Bill Clinton was the first politician to spot this, followed by Tony Blair and then George Bush. And while governments doing nothing is theoretically bad for bankers, governments doing nothing but wasting trillions on their legacies are an easy mark. Even better, illusionists say stuff like 'there is no such thing as too many shoes', 'never again will there be a bust', 'shock and awe will have us ouda there in three months' and 'every desk in every school in Britain will have a computer'. This was great: for money would be spent like a breached dam on the three items for which the money-pit is bottomless: footwear, IT and wars.

The new century was celebrated with domes, wheels and fireworks. Houses were changing hands at prices previously quoted for repainting Australian bridges, a prudently autistic Scot was British Chancellor, and Greenspan was printing greenbacks. He had to print banknotes, because if boom was no longer to be followed by bust, everyone would have to keep on borrowing. And being a banker, he knew perfectly well the lend-and-borrow mechanism could never fail. What's more, individuals no longer had to take the decision about whether $40,000 of plastic debt was a dandy idea or not, because Markets now did all the deciding. The only exception to all this was the canny Scot in Downing Street, who knew that really he had to do all the deciding, and so he decided that as money-printing caused inflation, he'd raise money by selling all Britain's gold at a knock-down price.

By 2002, it was obvious to anyone who could read that under the old rules, a bust was now (despite having been abolished) inevitable. The key rules to change were lending prudence (but that was a pushover, because President Clinton wanted every trash to have a trailer) healthy family life (only 24/7 corporate employee devotion to the scam could pull it off) and common sense: voters would have to believe that taxes could be lowered and welfare budgets increased, billions borrowed by government but national debt reduced, and new wannabes get on the housing ladder with the bottom five rungs missing. In fact this turned out to be a breeze, as everyone was so busy buying shoes, hitting office targets and trying to get sense out of call centres, within two years every supermarket, manufacturer, laptop provider and politician was lying at will with impunity. Terms like I didn't know about it, organic, fair trade, tax cut, discount, I did it for the shareholders, no mixed wards any more, yes and no rapidly meant either the opposite of their former meaning, or nothing at all.

But as the man said, there's always one isn't there? There's always some twit who spoils it for everyone else. The difference in this case was that there seemed to be millions of daft buggers, two largish countries called China and India knocking out clothing and garden lights for a grain of rice, and the European Union. The EU in particular had introduced its own currency - the Euro - and let in seven nations who before this had been producing tractors while using donkeys as the main currency form. So strict was the Union in launching the Euro and having debt guidelines, seven to ten countries each year breached them and two stayed out of the currency altogether. Bankers just loved the EU because it spent money like water falling over cliffs with the aid of a nuclear-powered Tsunami.

But there is always one, and it was Mr Elmer Drill of Banjo Valley, Tennessee. Elmer and his closely-knit family had been taking out farm expansion loans for over five years when the ruthlessly efficient credit-scoring system of The Tennessee Automobile Finance Bank spotted that the Drills didn't have a farm as such.

Now as serendipitous luck would have it, TAFB defaults clerk Blanche Zanuck was engaged at the time in undulating emotional R&R with one Jay Rabinowitz of the Mutual Kentucky Bank of America, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Global Amalgamated Packaged Isotope Exchanges Incorporated. When Jay heard Blanche's frightening tale of the Drill debt (now rumoured to involve $2.9 million owed to a bank only capitalised for $2.92 million) he immediately informed his section head, Senior VP Henry Luce-Bowels - a young man on the lookout for career-progressing opportunities on account of his own somewhat over-extended mortgage on fourteen acres of prime swampland just outside the small town of Bland Vapids Missouri.

That same evening, Henry disclosed over dinner with Bank President Ainsley O'Brien the appalling tale of just one small Tennessee bank's $40 million bad debt on a zero credit-worthy investment. It was, he suggested, only the tip of an iceberg destined to burn America's banking system to the ground. By ten-twenty am the following morning, Global Amalgamated's chief New York blabbermouth had given the whole $235 million scandal to the Wall Street Journal. The Journal's accountancy correspondent projected the over-reach to national level and predicted that a sub-prime credit crisis was about to engulf the world. The editor immediately put Ivy League blue-stocking researcher Eleanor Rooseharter onto the case of smoking out Banks Doing Daft Things. It took Ellie just three minutes to alight on Adam Applecart, the ethically, follically, mentally and logically challenged CEO of Northern English bank Northern Rock.

In a most remarkable twist of genetic fate, Adam was the 45th generation second cousin of Ostheres the Gaul. He had inherited his ancestor's less than close-up-and-personal attention to administrative detail, and was at the time of Ms Rooseharter's discovery captive under the blissfully robust belief system which insisted that wholesale interest rates could only go down. Thus he was not entirely prepared for the daftness rumours which began circulating around his bank with an urgency even he could not ignore.

On such small foundations began the Great Crash of 2008. From this point onwards, nobody was responsible for their actions and everyone else was to blame. Everyone had answers but nobody asked questions. Governments had only money but taxpayers had only debts. Many were those accused, but few if any had convictions. House prices fell, but politicians did not rise to the occasion. Millions of jobs were lost, but no wisdom was gained. Everyone was sad, but nobody said sorry.

The reason for this remains simple: long before the unfortunate Elmer Drill's alleged default (and the inebriated Tennessee accounts clerk whose human error gave such an entirely erroneous impression) the trail had gone cold on the real culprit Julius Nepos. For he was the first in a long line of leaders who believed that doing something wholly unwise could produce good results for those who came after.

The precedent he so nobly set continues today. From Harold Wilson's devalued Pound worth the same in our pockets, via Ronald Reagan's downward-trickling wealth that gushed upwards, and on through the Blair years when everything got better and yet somehow stayed the same as ever while the increasingly distant poor and rich brought a contented society closer than ever before......the enduring optimism of Julius Nepos' attempt to heal Rome's divisions gently by bringing in a hairy, violent bouncer lives on.

It is this tradition which, truly, makes us Homo sapiens. And the sooner we're rid of it, the better.

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