John Kay

Effective banking reform should aim at structures, not at intensified supervision. Resilient systems are simple ones.

The dynamism of a market economy comes from innovation in products and processes, and radical innovation in products and processes often – in fact usually – comes from outside the existing market structure.

A stance which is pro-business must be distinguished from a stance which is pro-market. In the two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, that distinction has not been appreciated well enough.

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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We should learn lessons from the Apollo programme and the people who design our television sets. Modular constructions are more robust.

Havens exist only because larger states allow them to exist, and larger states allow them to exist because the customers of havens are the rich and powerful.

The major beneficiaries of investment banking in the past decade have not been the customers of investment banks, or even investment banks themselves, but the investment bankers.

Few things corrode business efficiency and effective markets more insidiously than the discovery that it is more profitable to win the favour of politicians than to win the approval of customers.

Why do we use no more materials today than a century ago? Modern economic growth is about better rather than more

Christmas shopping in Marylebone High Street provides insight into the internalisation of externalities and the relationship between corporate governance and business strategy.