John Kay

Government spin is especially debilitating because government is a monopoly supplier of much of the information that an informed democracy requires.

There is no simple answer to the question: “How should capital gains be taxed?” So there are as many different regimes as there are national tax systems and they are often, as in Britain, in a state of seemingly endless flux.

Was there a “third way”, a politics which reconciled the market economy with the values of compassion and fairness that had traditionally motivated the political left? When was government interference with the operation of free markets justified, even necessary, and when did such intervention reduce choice and welfare?

The macroeconomics taught in advanced economics today is largely based on analysis labelled dynamic stochastic general equilibrium. The unappealing title gives the game away: the theorists are mostly talking to themselves. Their theories proved virtually useless in anticipating the crisis, analysing its development and recommending measures to deal with it.

The substitution of transaction-oriented dealings for relationship contracting added to profitability in the short run; but in the long run it eroded relationships that had been the underlying source of much of that profitability.

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.