Before the traders took over

It seem to me that we have to make up our minds "what do we stand for".

I have been reading a doom and gloom account of what BREXIT will mean in so far as

the City and the impact on Financial Services will be as we leave the single market.
The predicted impact of not being able to avail ourselves of being at the centre of the financial structure within the European Union, so devastating for some, that any price is worth paying.
Written from a position of a trader or a broker, perhaps a top flight banker the financial world is their universe and the "trade" is everything. The goings on in this highly developed and much maligned market, where the rules governing normal transactions are cast aside and the devious world of derivatives is a main the ingredient, where as  a sale is made you place a bet on the sale going sour (because you knew what you had sold was not what you had purported it to be). Where super fast computers are used to sift through the data and transact minute differences in currencies, not for any meaningful accumulation of real assets which can be sold as part of the consumerism world which is what we ordinary mortals see as reality, but for a buy/sell transaction that simply swops, from account A to account B, with no accumulation other than a paper one as one account is made richer at the expense of another.
The desperation for this immoral,  transactional merry go round to continue is so strong in the eyes of the City that to them Armageddon is just around the corner and they would cover their eyes and ears and transact just about anything to be able to keep things as they were.
The question as a country we have to ask is, should we be prepared to do virtually anything to stay on top, to be this mythical country which purports to be the 5th richest in the world but can hardly find the money from our own resources to build a strategic power station. Where the riches are merely tumble weed as we print more and more money to prop up a greater and greater financial deficit.

 Where we feel the trade of arms to a despotic regime like the Wahhabi run Saudis in Saudi Arabia is perfectly ok since on, the one hand they have the cash and we can diplomatically fudge the issue of what they do with the weapons and how many innocent civilians they kill.


 In the cause of being the 5th largest economy, we allowed our industries and the skills to wither away and rather we bought into the 'casino' for a quick buck.

At least the French, to say nothing of the Germans have kept their industries in tact and produce real products to export and balance the book on their imports.
The term Riches Countries in the World has a different connotation depending on how you equate a country being rich.
One such is, Gross domestic product  based on Purchasing Power per Capita. (How rich your citizens are as a proportion to GDP).
At the top of such a list comes :- Qatar, followed by Luxembourg and Singapore. Norway is 6th, USA 9th, Netherlands 13th, Germany 18th, France 25th and the U.K. 27th
The wealthiest in terms of actual wealth are :- USA, China, and Japan.
In terms of individual wealth including house ownership, :- Switzerland comes on top followed by Australia, the USA, the UK and Sweden. Germany and France come lower because house ownership is not the norm in those countries.
Using GDP as the measuring stick :- 1st USA, followed by China, Japan, Germany, the U.K. and France is 6th.
It's an interesting club we belong to, 5th when measured in gross earnings and 27th when taking those earnings and dividing them up as a proportion of the populous and the benefit they obtain.
The question I ask is would our "individual" wealth diminish proportion if we decided to be more prudent, more ethical in who we trade with and what we sell.
Norway is seen as an ethically proven country as is Sweden and Denmark all of whom sit well up the table of comparatives. Would we rather be chasing the Chinese with their sweat shop industrial methodology or the Americans with their Wall Street led, neo-con obsession with financial manipulation or should we gain some self respect and get off the tread mill and regain some of the admiration we once held for our legal propensity, our belief in doing the honest thing, in regaining a piece of the moral certitude we were famed for before the "traders" took over.