John Kay

This year I wrote that if men think about sex on average every seven seconds, the average man last thought about sex three and a half seconds ago. But neither love nor equity markets are so predictable.

Thirty years before Havel, George Orwell identified the corrupting influence of discourse based on the repetition of pre-packaged phrases. A corrupting influence not just on language but on society itself.

Financial markets are an effective discipline on profligate individuals and states because markets cannot easily be bullied or lobbied, and their threat to make the cost of funds prohibitive is effective.

What would an economist do if he wanted to study horses? He would go to his study and think “what would I do if I were a horse?”

Good models are simplifications, not black boxes whose workings are incomprehensible even to their operators.

If the eurozone had quickly recognised defeat in Greece, it would have suffered a manageable failure and learnt an important lesson for the future. Instead it has followed the martingale.

Groups make better decisions when the members are dissimilar than when they have a common background. I should not be prime minister, but I would like to imagine that I could be useful to someone who was. (Sorry David Cameron, I am otherwise engaged).

Investment banks have declined, while investment bankers have grown in power, influence – and remuneration. This is perhaps the most startling of the many consequences of Big Bang.

A semantic confusion leads us to use the word market to describe both the process which puts food on our table and the activity of gambling in credit default swaps. That confusion has enabled people to claim the virtues of the former for the latter.

The eurozone’s difficulties have been created by member states not markets, giving members more resources to fight markets makes things worse, not better.