Think back over the first week and a bit of the campaign, and I'll bet there is only one row that you can remember – Labour national insurance rises versus Tory spending cuts. The only subject in town has been how we pay off the bill from the financial crisis, and although the politicians are far from fully frank about it, if you follow things closely you will have picked up clear hints as to how more of the funds will be found. All three parties have refused to rule out VAT rises, and all three have effectively signalled that public servants from teachers to refuse collectors can expect a pension cut.

With payback time in prospect for ordinary people, it is astonishing that there has been precious little debate about how it was that the great bill was racked up in the first place. David Cameron carps a bit about Gordon Brown's imprudence during the good years, and Brown mutters about global economic tides, but in place of the usual elephant, we have a bull and a bear in the room. As is well familiar, City whizz kids fuelled by supersize bonuses made complex bets with other people's dough, and when it all went wrong the government had to step in with a bailout which, in its different forms, came to £1.5 trillion. And the books were further battered by the collateral damage which the financiers had done to the wider economy.

In a saner world, the election campaign would be dominated by the question of how to ensure that nothing similar can ever happen again, with the second great question being how to ensure that those who made the mess paid as much as possible towards cleaning it up. Neither question, however, has received systematic attention. The best we've had on the Labour side is Brown's reheating of some proposals on bankers' bonuses, and the concession (or what passes for a concession on planet Mandelson) from the business secretary that New Labour might have erred in being too unquestioning about deregulation. The Tory manifesto did propose a vague banking tax, but Cameron's own stand against fat-cattery, launched in the pages of the Guardian last week, missed the point completely because it was about high-paid public servants, as opposed to still higher-paid City folk. A week ago the Telegraph actually ran the headline – "Tory win best for the economy say top bankers" – perfectly epitomising a campaign that has utterly failed to reflect how far things have changed.

An over-boiling housing market fuelled frenzied City schemes for repackaging and passing on debt. But instead of proposals to stop it reheating again while keeping prices affordable, the campaign was prefigured by Labour's budget swiping a stamp-duty cut from the Tories, exactly the sort of tax bribe which stoked the flames in the first place. Businesses still struggle to get their hands on money to do productive things, and yet – despite the nationalisation of so many banks – not a squeak is heard about any public role in directing investment. And where on the campaign trail are the calls for the money men to take a longer-term interest in the firms that they work with? Whereof they have nothing to say, thereof they pass over in silence.