It's as if people used the invention of seat belts as an opportunity to take up drunk driving.

Economics as a discipline has in effect become the study of capitalism. The two are taken as the same subject.

But knowing that you had gone wrong, and knowing how you had gone wrong, were not the same thing as knowing how to put it right.

The standard personality type for a writer is a shy megalomaniac.

In an ideal world, one populated by vegetarians and Esperanto speakers, derivatives would be used for one thing only: reducing levels of risk. The list of individual traders who have lost more than a billion dollars at a time betting on derivatives is not short.

The financial system in its current condition poses an existential threat to Western democracy far exceeding any terrorist threat.

It has been a masterful fight-back by the big banks. We the paying public can't do anything much except admit defeat and settle back for the next set of bills. In the meantime, perhaps, we should try and think of a name for the new economic system, which certainly isn't capitalism ... The most accurate term would probably be "bankocracy".