Regulation is a word bankers love to hate.

But according to Sebastian Dovey, managing partner of wealth management consultancy Scorpio Partnership, they need to spend less time moaning about it and more time working with regulators to communicate the benefits of the industry.

“It’s not good enough to sit back and say this is going to cost us,” he says. “We’re here now, we’re in this mess. We’ve got to try and manage our way out of it.

“Bankers are always complaining about regulation and saying that’s the reasons for costs … It’s the wrong statement to make to say regulation is not necessarily going to help our business.”

While protecting an industry dedicated to making money for the most wealthy in society may be a tough political sell at the moment, Dovey suggests the industry talks to regulators about what the industry really does, how big it is and how important it is for incomes and jobs.

This sounds like sensible advice. Because when the current crisis is finally over, it looks less like a question of if and more like a question of how much regulation will come.

The credit crisis may be hitting the man on the street hard, but spending by the “other half” on the latest super yacht or Damien Hirst work of art looks set to carry on relatively unaffected.

Super-wealthy individuals in commodity-rich areas such as Russia and the Middle East are reaping the benefits of a five-year boom in oil and other commodity prices.

Even though oil and commodity prices are now coming off sharply, the boom is still feeding through into their spending power, provided they haven’t done anything too risky with their cash in the meantime.

And it’s happening just when everyone else is cutting back on non-essentials.

“It’s like philosophy,” explains ING’s Deputy CEO of Private Banking Bernard Coucke.

“Philosophy always comes after a century of economic prosperity, never before. Spending always comes after prosperity, never before.”

The hedge fund industry has moved away from its roots and lost its “crazy” spirit, says Eclectica Asset Management’s chief investment officer Hugh Hendry.

Whereas hedge funds used to be freewheeling vehicles able to exploit excellent opportunities with small pots of assets, many have now become large institutions or are far too correlated to equity markets, he says.

He believes the returns in the hedge fund industry will fall and could even be negative this year.