Upon returning from a business trip last week where I was forced not only to fly economy but also forgo the BA lounge, I took small comfort in the decent minibar tab I’d been able to rack up over the past days, complements of the company.

It was a rare occurrence. These days, you may not be able to blink without hearing rage over MP’s inflated expenses, but rest assured expenses are being deflated in one arena: the City of London.

So we’re staying curiously quiet at the moment, partially to relax as populist rage shifts from the economic to political elite, but mostly because there’s remarkably little work to do. Many investors are waiting for a "stimulus" of some sort before getting back into the markets - either a massive tanking or a bullish recovery, before they subject their funds to market madness.

It’s become a City survival trait to make four hours work turn into eight, or to sift through your “read” emails intently with a very serious look on your face. I’m starting to worry whether any City banker has anything resembling job security.

The bad news is that the day has come when (like the MP’s) I need to draft a compelling defence for not only my minibar expenses, but also my salary size, and spot on the payroll - and it better be good.

Until now, I've never had to defend my job professionally - only socially, to my “artistic” friends, who can't understand why I deserve such frivolous perks. I sometimes pull the “impossibly esoteric job” card, but they still regard the City in a kind of ethical purgatory, a limelight totally unflattering but nevertheless commanding respect on the basis that when it came to the subject of money, I was the expert.

Unfortunately, I can’t pull the “impossibly esoteric job” card with my boss. I could argue that my irreplaceable value lies in my ability to not only calculate excel figures like a monkey, but to live with live with the fear and uncertainty associated with those figures. I can tell you, with varying degrees of confidence, what those numbers actually mean and why they’re important.

In other words - I’ve been doing this for years, yet still come into work every day and don’t have a clue what I’m doing. The amount of “fortune telling” in the City necessary turns our jobs into an art, not a science, and we’re paid oodles do the impossible: predict the future. In the world of finance, there is simply way too much information to make an expert judgement - my “wisdom” becomes more like a better-educated guess.

Is my job and minibar tab really that replaceable? With some degree of confidence, “yes” would be my better-educated guess.