The mainstream media – missing the point yet again – reported the ten-figure profits of banks like HSBC and Barclays as signs of economic recovery.

Hardly. For a start, much of their income comes from over-charging small business: far from this being a sign of confidence, it shows they believe that their clients are actually going to collapse, so they are trying to get as much as they can out of them while they last – and, in doing so, they bring on the collapse.

The collapse of a small business does not make headlines as a bank’s profits make headlines – but the former is far more symptomatic of what is happening on the ground.

In Britain alone, 19,000 shops have closed – of which 7,000 are branches, the rest all businesses in their own right.

Yet the full disaster will only become clear later.

Shop closures have an accelerator effect. If a shop closes and is boarded up, it makes customers less likely to go to neighbouring shops.

It only takes a fairly small proportion of empty shops in an area to discourage customers from shopping there altogether – it is more convenient and less depressing to use an out-of-town supermarket.

Town centres, district shopping centres, and streets with a long merchant tradition are all vulnerable to total collapse when shop closures reach a critical mass.

Many of these shops are never coming back.

A combination of increased employment regulation, payroll taxes, unsympathetic planning or zoning authorities, and rates or property taxes have been making life ever more difficult for small businesses in the retail sector, even before the recession.

The destruction of small retailers may be good for the big supermarket chains, but it will be bad for the rest of us.

We will be left only with a choice of chains – which is a singularly apt expression come to think of it.