John Kay

There is a difference between repeatedly engaging in actions you believe will make you popular, and demonstrating the qualities of leadership that prompt people to vote for you.

Even if economic issues are more central to politics than ever before, argument today is less about the nature of economic systems than about the relative abilities of different politicians to administer a system on whose basic structure all are in agreement.

British governments will need to make tough choices about taxes and public spending in the decade ahead. These choices are inevitably political. But they can only be well made if the information on which these choices are based is not.

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

All our experience of the development of information technology starts from what the customer might want rather than what the technology might do.

If you aim to create a dynamic, successful business, a state-owned utility is not the place to start.

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.

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

Government underwriting of deposits should be matched by assets of comparable quality. Otherwise the mismatch of risk provides an unjustifiable public subsidy to the banking sector.