John Kay

The true and fair view is subjective, and no accounting principles, however extensive, can cover all conceivable situations.

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.

Bookreview: Uncommon Sense: economic insights, from marriage to terrorism by Gary Becker and Richard Posner

Markets are not a well-oiled machine: they are a constantly changing, adaptive biological system.

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.

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

Economics is not so much the queen of the social sciences but the servant, and needs to base itself on anthropology, psychology – and the sociology of ideologies.

Businesses are complex systems. We tend to infer design where there was only adaptation and improvisation, and to attribute successful business outcomes to the realisation of some deliberate plan.

Bogus quantification attempts to compress complex problems and analyses into single observations.