John Kay

Every era spawns financial follies. Every era spawns observations that, with hindsight, protagonists wish they had not made.

Regulation as supervision can be simultaneously extensive and intrusive, yet ineffective and prone to regulatory capture. History suggests that supervision is rarely a success.

The assessment of the value of new products is best carried out, not by manufacturers nor regulators but by retailers in close touch with the needs of their customers.

If financial institutions are to survive, they must behave more like supermarkets

The Reform of Banking Regulation
We should spend less time trying to ensure that our regulators can regulate financial behemoths with turnovers bigger than the GDP of many countries and more on trying to redesign the financial services industry so that regulation focuses on the interests of the public as consumers of financial services.
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One lesson of recent events is that there seem to be no limits to the greed of the greedy. But perhaps the explanation is simply the one Madoff gave to the judge who sentenced him: “I made a mistake.”

It is particularly easy for those who work in financial institutions to make the mistake of believing that their success is the result of exceptional skill rather than good fortune. Until vanity is vanquished, I anticipate that diversification to the level of incompetence will continue to be a powerful element in business behaviour.

If you want to understand how the City came to play such a central role in British economic and political life, why a crash was inevitable, and why the crisis is being resolved on terms which give so much and ask so little of the financial sector, this is the most important thing you need to understand: the influence of investment banks on modern politics and policy.

Our leaders blog, twitter and consult focus groups. But these developments do not make society better governed.

Great and enduringly successful organisations are not stages on which geniuses can strut. They are structures that make the most of the ordinary talents of ordinary people.