If I were asked to draw a useful lesson from my 39 years in newspapers, which end today, I might say: respect the power of the financial industry.

In the mid-1980s I remember investigating the new phenomenon of banks pushing credit cards. Well, 30 years on we have ‘free’ borrowing for 40 months, creeping and unasked-for rises in credit limits, and a personal debt mountain.

Cowboy lenders are cramped or culled, but the big debt wagon rolls on. How can our economy ever stabilise under such a weight?

I began my initiation into the mysteries of personal finance 25 years ago on the theme of pensions, and how much the industry was creaming off unsuspecting savers.

Sound familiar? Although firms have gradually been dragged into a new era of transparency and fair charging, they still have a get-out for a huge chunk of so-called ‘legacy’ business, milking their oldest or sleepiest customers.

Next came Equitable Life. Financial writers were enthusiastic converts to its mutual message, and at least one highly-regarded national journalist lost much of his savings when Equitable collapsed into a black hole of its own making. The regulator was found to be culpable, but the Labour government fought for a decade against any redress for losses.

Many of us were warning of the dangers of the banks’ payment protection insurance racket years before the regulator finally stirred. Eventually it prompted consumer rights overkill, helping to swell a phoney claims industry ranging across faked motor bumps, non-existent personal injuries, and banking losses never sustained – an alternative amoral financial powerhouse.

It was fitting that the banks’ PPI penance has been one of the big contributors to economic growth after the financial crisis. But a claims time bar is surely overdue.

The endowment mortgage saga highlighted most people’s naivety about the stock market in the era before the dotcom crash. Everyone believed the salesman’s yarn that markets always went up by at least eight per cent a year. Even the salesmen believed it in those days.

But despite the lessons of economic and stock market history, the new breed of have-a-go investors was cruelly unprepared for the events of 2008. Especially those who worked for RBS.

I have kept my copy of the RBS chairman’s speech from the annual meeting in 2008. He said: “We have taken a huge step in the development of the RBS Group, building a global banking platform with all the attributes necessary to achieve good, sustainable growth.”

As a trusting shareholder, why wouldn’t you have believed him?

The shareholder group now suing the bank for £1billion over misleading directors’ statements at that time may take some comfort from the David and Goliath case we reported on between 2010 and 2015, in which bankrupt developer Derek Carlyle managed to take RBS all the way to the Supreme Court – and won.

At the end of 2007, there was a queue of investment experts forecasting that the flying FTSE-100 would hit a new record level by the end of 2008. The trouble is, so many experts are directly or indirectly in the pay of the fund industry, which depends on continually stoking up new business, no matter how high the market barometer might be.

The media of course relies heavily on the views of such experts, and the national press still enjoys a vital flow of financial advertising.

Even the legendary hospitality of the money industry lives on. The old days of insurers flying parties of financial advisers to exotic hideaways for hedonistic weekends may have passed, but financial writers are still regularly wooed with invitations and tickets. Of course good relationships are important and it doesn’t influence any of us....does it?

So take the ‘experts’ with a pinch of salt. My final business interview found star fund manager Thomas Moore of Standard Life Investments finding ‘no sign of a recession’ in dozens of first-hand discussions with companies recently. Our long-time columnist Colin McLean suggested on this page last month that Brexit might signal a slowing or reversal of globalisation.

As a 30-year scribe of Scottish business, it would not be hard to wish for a reversal of the trend that has seen so many of our biggest most important Scottish companies surrender their independence, diminishing our economy.

Consumer power has driven some great changes for the better, and some industry pillars such as Standard Life, Nationwide and Royal London, two of them mutuals and one with a mutual history, have been notably ahead of the curve.

But that powerful industry will always be at least one step ahead of the ordinary punter until we take financial education more seriously.

The pensions liberation revolution may turn out to be the latest lesson that has to be learned the hard way for many.

Though personally, as a lucky member of Generation Pension, I do admit to raising a glass to liberation today.

Thanks to everyone, and next week The Herald welcomes Margaret Taylor .