John Kay

The jobs and growth the bankers claim will be in jeopardy are their own: the pressing needs of the real economy point not to delaying change, but to implementing it as speedily as possible.

A few failed components may bring about collapse in a complex interdependent system. As in the Gulf of Mexico spill, or at the Fukushima disaster, or in the credit market in 2008.

Trams were phased out because they were inferior to buses as a means of public transport. They still are.

Always ask of data “what is the question to which this number is the answer?”. “Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation on a like-for-like basis before allowance for exceptional restructuring costs” is the answer to the question “what is the highest profit number we can present without attracting flat disbelief?”.

Rousseau was an early and incisive critic of the idea that self-interested behaviour would necessarily work to the benefit of all. If the hunt were to catch a deer, it would need to establish shared values, and probably impose them through some sort of hierarchy. Without such a structure, there would be no more for supper than the occasional hare.

Sovereign debt repayment is more about politics than economics.

At a time when public expenditure cuts are focused excessively on capital expenditure, we are in danger of directing too much investment to vanity projects – like the Olympics, high-speed broadband, high-speed rail – whose returns are political excitement rather than tangible.

In the dollar bill auction, one party eventually scores a pyrrhic victory and takes possession of the dollar bill. Both parties lose, but the smaller loser is the person who sticks out longest. That is not usually the rational player.

When New York crassly mismanaged its financial affairs, the president’s response was famously paraphrased as “Ford to City: drop dead!” When Greece was guilty of similar mismanagement the reaction of the ECB and the European Commission was “how can we help?”.

By the time Stephen Byers could slip from one cabinet post to another without taking responsibility for any of the blunders that seemed to happen wherever he was in charge, ministerial accountability had been replaced by T.S. Eliot’s cat: “When a crime’s discovered, then Macavity’s not there.”