Every economy needs an engine-room: better one manned by bankers than none at all

Well, unfortunately the water is pouring into this engine room now that the vessel has hit the iceberg.

The fact is that this globally extractive industry is - with a few honourable exceptions - parasitic upon truly productive industries. It produces virtually nothing of real value, but rather, manufactures out of thin air financial claims over real value.

I must say I had not appreciated the full effect on government finances that a collapse in City earnings will bring about. It makes it all the more necessary to come up with a new framework for public finance.

As you say, we're just hitting the windscreen as we apply the brakes: the real crash is just up ahead....

"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson

A Lazy Goat Diary or a Lazy Quote Diary?

It has come to seem, for many people, a sort of laboratory in which a rawer, less-cohesive Britain is emerging; a crowded, hustling place of vaulting earnings for the rich and of widening income disparities, which drains talent and wealth from the rest of the country.

Ya think?

Despite these fears, those who cheer as the City falters, will be wrong. The gains from London's position as a global financial hub, a source of envy to other countries, outweigh the losses. Every economy needs an engine-room: better one manned by bankers than none at all.

Of course they outweigh the losses if you're one of those with a regular seven figure bonus.

If you're in the majority of the population - the poorly paid who can barely afford somewhere to live - the losses far outweight the gains.

Because there are no gains.

Does the Econo take its own writing seriously? Are the writers genuine ideologues, or do they sit around their word processors laughing and chuckling to themselves as they write this crap?

banking has controlled politics since the medici era; without credit to make war, no ruler could expand his realm.

these last 100 years they have increasingly outgrown their 'eminence grise' role and instead of representing sobriety and prudence, it appears they have become corporate gamblers, as well as treasure-protectors for the dictators' ill-gotten gains, narco- and human traffic money launderers, as well as their old role of financing military spending and manipulating politics from behind the velvet curtain.

i hope chris is right and out of the ashes of this worldwide ponzi scam there can arise a fairer, more transparent system.

maybe banking needs to go back to being stodgy and dull!

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty