John Kay

A small fraction of the ingenuity devoted to the construction of complex financial instruments that no one should want could advantageously be applied to the construction of less complex instruments that meet the needs of the Big Society.

Good quangos have specific technical expertise and their purpose is to take issues out of politics. Bad quangos have no distinctive skills and are designed to put issues into politics.

The distinction between the creation and the appropriation of wealth is vital, if not always clear. But our ability to recognise it will determine, not just the fate of individuals, but the future of modern capitalism.

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.

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

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

Great and enduringly successful organisations are not stages on which geniuses can strut. They are structures that make the most of the ordinary talents of ordinary people.

No one wants bank managers to be replaced by civil servants. But there are a lot of perfectly competent bank managers out there, even if there are a lot of incompetent bank executives.

The primary purpose of government investment in financial institutions is not to ensure that the taxpayer gets its money back – although that issue should certainly not be neglected – but to ensure that ordinary banking functions operate well.

We seek regulators more competent than their private sector counterparts, we ask them to review not just procedure but also strategy, we expect the taxpayer to take financial responsibility for their failures. There is a name for that policy. It is nationalisation.