John Kay

Since there are many issues in public debate, attention to any one is necessarily transient. The attention of vested interests to their own concerns, however, is permanent.

The jobs and growth the bankers claim will be in jeopardy are their own: the pressing needs of the real economy point not to delaying change, but to implementing it as speedily as possible.

As the commercial market is being transformed, anyone who thinks that the policy challenge is to restrict internet piracy has missed the point.

The suggestion that we might partially turn back the clock has been described as a call for “Hovis banking”, referring to an advertisement that plays on nostalgia. The commercial succeeds because we believe the bread our grandparents ate, before innovations in technology and marketing, was nicer and more wholesome. Perhaps that is true in banking as in baking.

We will succeed in managing financial risk better only when we come to recognise the limitations of formal modelling. Control of risk is almost entirely a matter of management competence, well-crafted incentives, robust structures and systems, and simplicity and transparency of design.

When an industry model is broken, the best business strategy may be to manage its decline.

Britain is a small island, dependent on frequent and reliable air travel. From the distribution of its population, its biggest airport would ideally be north-west of London.

The value of Modigliani-Miller – like any good model in physics or economics – lies as much in the questions it raises as in the truths it reveals.

The theory that the right answer to the gap in information and knowledge between the investment bank’s structured products division and the person in the street is to give the person in the street more information is absurd.

The books that Britain exports have long been made from trees grown abroad. Then globalisation meant the paper was also made abroad, and increasingly the printing took place overseas. Soon selling a book will involve no physical objects. The division of labour becomes ever finer and generally increases the wealth of all involved in the production process.