One of my former bosses at Goldman Sachsused to tell me that trading was not the smartest way to build a career in finance. The real way to make money was to let other people do the trading and investing, and just be the middleman. Taking a little turn or commission from both buyers and sellers, many times a day, was the surest way of becoming rich. I did not listen – trading was my only love. Money did not interest me as much as the daily fight to be smarter than the market.

Over time, my boss became very wealthy indeed, by taking more and more turns, which grew larger and larger in size. He was not atypical of what has taken place in the City of London over the past 20 years. Banks have been robbed by their own employees year after year through bonuses. Private equity firms have stripped companies down to the bone with no respect for history or social repercussions. New, complex derivative instruments have been invented, designed to be understood by only a select few traders, and to be lapped up by the naive. The asymmetric pay-off is an affront to morals and ethics.

So when I read about the verdict handed down to Kweku Adoboli, who lost an extraordinary amount of money at UBSand was this week sentenced to seven years in jail, I was not surprised. Some people have wondered whether he can actually be blamed for the giant losses in the first place, working in an environment that must have seemed to him to be purely focused on making money at any cost, and where few people are ever fired or asked difficult questions when making large profits. To me, Adoboli comes across as a decent, hard-working person, little different from any of his colleagues. His defence seems to have been that he never wanted to hurt anyone but that his trades started going wrong and he was just trying to make the money back. Sounds genuine enough to me.