John Kay

To learn from mistakes, you must first acknowledge them.

There is a difference between repeatedly engaging in actions you believe will make you popular, and demonstrating the qualities of leadership that prompt people to vote for you.

The assertion that depositors in Kaupthing and Landsbanki have a claim on ordinary people who were too prudent to put money there, or did not have any money to deposit in the first place, has little justice or legal basis.

The true and fair view is subjective, and no accounting principles, however extensive, can cover all conceivable situations.

The lesson of EMI is not that media industries are unique, but that you can lose a lot of money if you overpay for a company with a broken business model, as you can in any other industry.

“Too big to fail” insurance is likely to leave the non-financial economy with the worst of all possible worlds – less public control of risk and greater potential calls on taxpayers.

John reviews Joseph Stiglitz’s book on the financial crisis: Freefall: Free Markets and the Sinking of the Global Economy

Even if economic issues are more central to politics than ever before, argument today is less about the nature of economic systems than about the relative abilities of different politicians to administer a system on whose basic structure all are in agreement.

Tailgaters think the view that their behaviour is dumb is based on a purely theoretical analysis, which is refuted by the tailgater’s practical experience. And so the culture of self-confident, self-congratulatory tailgaters perpetuates itself.

Digital media is the future and two decades from now the book business will look very different.