The financial crisis was indeed a failure of regulation. The system was overwhelmed by innovation. Regulators are going to have to catch up &, you could say, try to hold innovation back. The question to ponder is this: in which other industries will curbing innovation – also known as market forces – strike governments or voters, in the US or anywhere else, as a good idea?
Clive Crook

Watching a few current affairs programmes over the weekend, your humble correspondent couldn’t help but be struck by the calls from just about everyone for all bankers to be strung up with even greater alacrity than some 500 hundred years ago, the good citizens of Middlesbrough hung a monkey in the mistaken belief that this ships mascot was a shipwrecked survivor from the defeated Spanish armada.

Clearly hoodies, illegal immigrants or our home-grown Jihadis are no longer a threat: in fact at the rate we seem to be going, forget downloading plans for a dirty bomb … even being in possession of a chalk striped suit will earn you a stint at Her Majesty’s pleasure. The whole current financial fiasco is starting to highlight once-Great Britain’s most unpleasant personality trait – envy. Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti declared in March of this year that the accumulation of “excessive wealth” was one of the seven modern social sins & we in the UK have aleady luanched the Inquisition

The socialists with their creed of collectivism are now in the ascendancy & it is worth pointing out at this juncture that as a percentage of GDP, the amount that Comrade Brown has spent nationalising the British financial services industry over the last few days far exceeds the amounts spunked away by his socialist heroes on the wholesale nationalisation of British industry post-WW2.