John Kay

More competition and a reduction of the conflicts of interest between different financial services activities is the antidote to gouging. The separation of retail and investment banking would begin a move away from the transaction-focused, sales-driven culture of recent years and reassert the development of long-term relationships with customers.

It was not British housebuyers who took on debts they could not repay in the recent boom: it was British banks.

Tailgaters think the view that their behaviour is dumb is based on a purely theoretical analysis, which is refuted by the tailgater’s practical experience. And so the culture of self-confident, self-congratulatory tailgaters perpetuates itself.

In the name of free markets, we created a monster that threatens to destroy the very free markets we extol.

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

The most effective control is other parties’ diligence in assessing the businesses with which they deal.

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.

When the next crisis hits, and it will, the frustrated public is likely to turn, not just on politicians who have been negligently lavish with public funds, or on bankers, but on the market system. What is at stake now may not just be the future of finance, but the future of capitalism.

Markets are not a well oiled physical machine: they are a constantly changing, adaptive biological system. Pluralism is their motive force, their essence chaotic, their development inherently uncertain. If we could predict the evolution of markets, we would not need markets in the first place.

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.