To add insult to injury, Sir Felix discovers a fellow with an ace up his sleeve, literally, but the others refuse to believe it, for they "would infinitely rather be cheated than suspect any one of their own set of cheating them". This is also the creed of the City: "Unanimity is the very soul of these things," says Melmotte. Society is riding on personal credibility and financial credit. Melmotte, mortgaged to the hilt, understands "the nature of credit, how strong it is - as the air - to buoy you up; how slight it is - as a mere vapour - when roughly touched." Inevitably, the stock market crash comes, the credit crunch hits, and Melmotte's railway stocks are worth as little as Sir Felix's IOUs.

The Way We Live Now reminds us that there will always be bubbles, boom and bust, swindlers, and also honest men who, Trollope explains, "reconcile themselves to swindling". There will always be mystifying commodities like Mexican railways, dotcoms and derivatives. Occasionally, there will even appear in our midst an attractive, gun-toting lady from west of the Rockies, like the hero's nemesis, Mrs Hurtle.

One might call Trollope, a keen observer of human nature present at the birth of our modern financial system, an early behavioural economist. He would recognise in our swindled (and swindling) bankers the poor gullible habitués of the much-lamented Beargarden, the club which offered so little propriety and so few "beastly rules". "Dear old place!" Lord Nidderdale sighs, "I always felt it was too good to last. I fancy it doesn't do to make things too easy," for, "by George, before you know where you are, you find yourself among a lot of blackguards."

But Trollope was at heart an optimist. "I think that men on the whole do live better lives than they did a hundred years ago," with more justice and charity abroad, says a kindly clergyman in The Way We Live Now. Barack Obama's election to the White House in 2008 is proof that humankind continues to advance, slowly but surely. In the words of Plantagenet Palliser, Trollope's champion of the decimal coinage, "a desire for wealth is the source of all progress. Civilisation comes from what men call greed. Let your mercenary tendencies be combined with honesty and they cannot take you astray." Of course, greed is the easy part. As Lord Nidderdale says, "If one wants to keep one's self straight, one has to work hard at it, one way or the other. I suppose it all comes from the fall of Adam."