John Kay

The core problem is that banks have no intention of abiding by the spirit, rather than the letter, of any regulatory rules.

The share of financial services in national income has increased. Should we be pleased, or concerned, by this development?

No one loves the bearer of bad news. But short sellers, Wikileaks, accountants who mark to market, and even rating agencies, should be applauded for telling people the news they do not want to hear.

Internal rates of return conflate rewards for risk with returns for patience.  That is why they are often misleading indicators of the profitability of alternative investments.
Students of corporate finance are taught the dangers of judging projects by their internal rate of return. The problem is that the attractiveness of a project depends not just on [...]

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

Bogus quantification attempts to compress complex problems and analyses into single observations.

Once loans can be bought and sold, what matters is not their soundness but their price – with the predictable consequences of instability and price fluctuations far in excess of any reasonable assessment of underlying change in fundamental value.

Values of integrity, of public service, and of responsible stewardship of the money of others can never be replaced by rules or imposed by regulation.

When the future arrived in 2007, we learnt that others had febezzled from us on a massive scale. And that we had also febezzled from ourselves.

It is true that professional reputations are not what they once were, that self-regulation of standards of competence has often been inadequate, that professions’ ethical standards have declined generally. But it is also striking that such decline is most noticeable in the areas of law and accountancy closest to financial services.