Are you feeling, as I am this week, like some crackpot Jeremiah who for years has paraded the high street clutching his “End Is Nigh” placard, to the derision of guffawing shoppers? Now cometh the day when the skies darken, the very Earth trembles, you point wearily to your battered sign and utter the most unwelcome four words in any language: “I told you so.”

It is an apt phrase, “credit bubble”, because, for the decade that we've been sealed within it, no other reality seemed feasible. Inside this fiscal Center Parcs, natural laws of financial gravity were suspended. House prices pointed only upwards, interest rates only down. We could manufacture nothing, but somehow be rich. We could live on perpetual credit, take out mortgages four times our salaries because, hey, the bank wasn't fussed that we'd get fired and default, so why should we fret? And the oldest, dreariest of these rules, that there is a correlation between effort and success, thrift and prosperity, was dispatched with a clink of crystal flutes.

That reward is random, that our livelihoods are tied mainly to fickle fate, that risk is the only route to gain - and the more you risk the more you gain - is a gambler's creed. It is no coincidence that the Government that encouraged the financial markets to run riot also liberalised gambling legislation, rebranding a vice into a cheery leisure activity.

Money, we were told, should be allowed to flow where it will and we should be free to catch it where we could. No one was dragging us into betting shops or 3am online Texas Hold-em tournaments any more than they were forcing us into Icelandic ISAs or inflated off-plan property schemes. We wanted instant windfalls: to hell with persistence, incremental improvements and lifelong slog. “Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich,” said George Bernard Shaw. “Something for nothing.”

The Government made gamblers of us all, imposed a wide-boy opportunism upon our essentially cautious and responsible national character. It legitimised a financial capitalism with no connection to funding businesses or growing markets, to the greater wealth of nations, but was pure, irresponsible, ruthless speculation. Lately it appears that traders exhibited the signs of gambling addiction: “chasing” it is called, a determined and foolhardy repeat-betting, a desperate faith that one more punt could send that jackpot gushing forth.

We were sold the gambling industry's chief lie: that we stood equal to the bank (casino or City), that our chances were even, that if we didn't like the stakes we could walk away. Libertarians scoffed at the notion that we needed defending against the financial corporations or the casino industry. We Jeremiahs were patronising statists, trying to “protect people from themselves”. Only now is it fully clear that the odds were stacked, the dice loaded.

Last week, little reported amid this bigger calamity, the Local Government Association expressed concern that poorer districts are being flooded with betting shops. Under new planning law a council cannot turn down a new gambling outlet just because a street contains six others. Higher rents and the expectation that betting shops must provide multiscreen surround-sound gee-gee races instead of stubby pencils has pushed up costs. But the retreat to cheaper neighbourhoods is because they know who, in a recession, will remain their core customers: those with little left to lose. The rich gamble for a lark: the poor in desperation.

I hope that my own MP, Tessa Jowell, architect of the 2005 Gambling Act, glows with pride when she passes the gleaming double-fronted new betting shop on an otherwise tatty estate in my South London 'hood. To me it is as pernicious as the heroin dealers who stalk the landings. But I have always found gambling the most inexplicable vice: at least drugs give you release, whoring an orgasm, drink a night of oblivion. Where's the fun in losing your day's wages - even the tenner that might buy baby a new bonnet - on the speed of a flickering horse.

Those opposed to gambling because it sucks the pay cheques from the poor had a “whiff of snobbery” about them, Ms Jowell once said. Well, new Labour soon dispatched the notion that worship of wealth for its own sake was vulgar.

Last summer, researching high society, I found myself in London nightclubs where City punters compete to outspend neighbouring tables, ordering £500 bottles of vodka covered in Swarovski crystals or Methuselahs of champagne, brought to tables by waitresses amid a bouquet of sparklers and the Rocky theme. A club owner said that on bonus night the City boys threw a cloud of banknotes in the air just to enjoy the ensuing scramble. Always outside, in a chilly line were shopgirls and hairdressers, longing to join the party.

A gambling culture justifies huge inequality: they had their chance, the same as us, and were unlucky, the sad suckers. Money, being easy-come easy-go, has little value and nor do the things it buys. I wonder, even now that the financial auguries are so dire, if we can break our addiction to a consumerism so ingrained that shopping has become our national hobby, our Sunday worship, our patriotic duty, where celebrities are applauded solely for their elegant mastery of dropping a wad and where we are chided by retailers every Christmas if we fail to buy more than last year.

Yet in all the gloom to come, we can at least enjoy the demise of the most egregious excesses: Foxton's estate agents, designer children's clothes, replacing mobile phones every six months, buy-to-let leeches boasting about their “portfolios”, disposable fashion, monstrous skyscrapers blockading every inch of riverfront, having your shinbone chipped on the Tube by some bint wielding a £700 bling bag weighed down with chains and stirrups...

Not everyone in the bubble was a believer. Many of us, branded fun-suckers, sock-darners and Puritans, knew in our bones that it couldn't last. Let's hear it for those who saw their house as a home, never an investment, the string-collectors and tinfoil-savers, the no-central-heating until November hardos, the rainy-day investors, those who - bizarre notion - “saved up” for things, new mums who didn't feel demeaned by their sister's secondhand pram. Maybe they won't inherit the Earth, but they stand a better chance than most, now the bubble has burst.

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