John Kay

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.

John explains why capital is the stuff you have to protect yourself and why banks can never have enough of it.

There are only a few basic kinds of deception and self-deception in finance. John illustrates some of the key mechanisms.

Starting from a flawed productivity comparison, John highlights the difficulties in interpreting economic statistics.

What are the similarities, and the differences, between the uses and needs of accounting in the public and private sectors?