John Kay

Wherever there is uncertainty, market prices reflect the beliefs of those who are more than averagely sanguine. The result is a reserve of illusory value, constantly depleted by events and replenished by fresh uncertainties.

Anonymity is often the most effective means of telling truth to power: and sometimes the only one.

The risks that the financial sector has devised techniques to manage are not the everyday risks of an uncertain world: they are risks almost entirely created within the financial sector itself.

While there may be some economies of scope in the provision of financial services, they don’t in any event compare in order of magnitude with the collateral economic damage imposed by recent failures in the financial sector.

The Independent Commission on Banking headed by Sir John Vickers which the coalition Government has established will be told that such a separation between utility and casino can’t be done – although it was done in Britain for most of the 20th century.

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.

We do need to increase the scope for structured and independent inquiry outside government, but with the kind of authority that only official status can confer.

Insurance is partly a market in securities, partly a mechanism for collective action; a means by which risks are traded, but also a means by which risks are socialised.

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

The assertion that depositors in Kaupthing and Landsbanki have a claim on ordinary people who were too prudent to put money there, or did not have any money to deposit in the first place, has little justice or legal basis.