With exquisite timing, our financial adviser came calling this week. In his soft Mancunian accent he outlined a strategy for our bit of savings which involved it being put in something called a “wrapper” and setting sail for a new life in Dublin, whereupon it could be invested in, perhaps, Merrill Lynch. At this point I woke abruptly from the deep reverie I enjoy while people discuss matters fiscal.

Excuse me, but just yesterday didn't Merrill Lynch have a really big wobble? Weren't they narrowly saved from a cardboard-boxing by a handout from Bank of America?

The financial adviser smiled patiently and shook his head. This was different, he said. Our money would be safe against all economic hurricanes because of X and Y. And, besides, it was 100 per cent guaranteed by Z. Having already reached the envelope of my monetary knowledge, I could only nod vaguely.

Now, I am in no sense impuning the probity of this pleasant man. But what would it take for me to evaluate his advice? Hours trawling financial websites, trying to acquire instant fluency in a language as arcane as Aramaic, a panicky call to Money Box Live, getting a second opinion from yet another financial adviser? And I've seen enough of those guys with their stripy, monogrammed shirts, their Jags and Parker pens. The ones who bounce into your life all convivial and remembering your kids' names just before April, to sell you a TESSA or an ISA or a POPPA or a TEASER, whatever the latest groovy new financial “product” - a term bestowing a reassuring tangibility upon something utterly notional - and they drink your coffee and you sign on the line. Then they disappear for another financial year or maybe for ever.

Until a friend says “My adviser is great - you must see him” and he turns up, looks sadly through the PLOPS and TRUSSES you bought from the other guy, points out they performed worse than John Sergeant on Strictly Come Dancing and whips out glossy prospectuses for a whole bunch more. And you think, it was someone just like you who sold me that endowment mortgage.

Because these are the people we entrust with our old age, whose tireless research, acumen and, above all, integrity will determine whether we celebrate our 70th birthdays beneath a Tuscan olive grove or working the paint-mixer machine in B&Q. And yet, according to research conducted by Which?, about a third of independent financial advisers conveniently forget to tell us that if we sign up for a particular hot new fund, by pure coincidence, they rake in a juicy commission. Admittedly, they have a living to make and provide a service, of sorts, guiding financial illiterates like me through the impenetrable global economy.

What we saw this week was two very different reactions to the crisis: those aghast as they cogitated details of the egregious risk-taking of the City and those who could understand the scary headlines merely as anger from the gods.

Once at dinner I was seated next to a scientist who, by use of simple language and borrowed cutlery, explained chaos theory. I grasped it! A lacuna in my education filled. But then in the car home, I realised that chaos theory had gone again. My mental hard drive could simply not store it. And so, as I write this, after careful study of graphics in the news pages, I think I understand the hateful cynicism of short-selling. But then by tomorrow I may not.

Aptitude with money appears to have no relation to schooling or intelligence. Sir Alan Sugar believes it an innate talent, like perfect pitch. I know many, often of slender means, who spend hours tending and primping their portfolios, reading the business pages, ingesting forecasts and indices. The Institute for Public Policy Research reported that, by middle age, what seems like a dreary and soulless hobby to the rest of us will have accrued these folk the equivalent of an extra year's salary.

Whereas around nine million British people describe ourselves as “financially phobic”, shove bank statements in a drawer, leap to switch off Vincent Duggleby and if forced to listen to the business round-up, like the dog from The Simpsons, just hear “la-la-la”. The Financial Services Authority found that a quarter of adults did not even understand that their pensions were invested in the stock market.

Yet this is unsurprising given that most of us were raised in financially simpler times, when almost all employers had pension schemes and banks were deep, impenetrable vaults for your hard-earned, not virtual casinos. The only economic advice I ever received from my parents was via Polonius: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”. Very Yorkshire.

Meanwhile, speaking for the Government was Mrs Thatcher the faux housewife fretting over the cost of her shopping basket, the original voice of Prudence.

But now we are individuals “free” to forge our own fiscal futures, to weigh up this myriad of financial “products” like apples on a stall, where even choosing a gas or phone company requires a MBA, where - courtesy of student loans - adult life begins as an initiation into debt. And from the Government the message is... what? Certainly not save for your old age. New Labour sought to escape old-school working-class associations of yawnsome thrift and joyless parsimony and so the unspoken message of the Blair boom years was always spend, spend, spend.

Why deny yourself that easyJet mini-break or must-have bag? Whack it on the plastic and pay whenever. Even gambling was rebranded from vice to harmless fun. A credit boom fuelled the economy and a government, fearful of recession, was never going to advise its card-juggling citizenry: “For your future's sake, stop bloody shopping!” And now the financially illiterate are at the heart of the current crisis in the sub-prime fiasco. America's poor and ill-educated, desperate to own their own homes, never fully comprehending - or, more likely, not being told by grasping lenders - that interest rates could rise, make repayments impossible, that their homes could be lost.

The current crisis raises the question how much knowledge a person needs simply to navigate modern life. How irksome to thrust financial literacy upon an already overloaded school curriculum, as Ed Balls proposes. But better that than the current choice: trusting the slippery shyster or buying a bigger mattress.

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