Financial services is not the happiest place to be these days, and nobody’s mood would have been improved by a report last month from JPMorgan Australia chief economist, Stephen Walters. In it he predicts that a slowdown in China will lead to Australia’s unemployment rate doubling between now and late 2010, to a 9 per cent level not seen since Paul Keating’s days.

It’s fitting I suppose that JPMorgan deliver this news. At presstime at least, it had been doing less than many of its fellow American banks to add to unemployment. But the report got me thinking. How might Australia seize this most unlikely of moments to create jobs in what is presently the most unlikely of industries – ours? A few possibilities emerged at the roundtable we ran this month with RBC Dexia Investor Services, on the subject of ‘Building Better Investment Distribution’.