This is by Zoe Williams in the Guardian today:
We end this year looking at a lot of wrong crowds — a corporate crowd that avoids tax like crazy, a criminal crowd with new impunity, a banking crowd that thinks of itself as a Calvinist elect, without the self-denial. It's a huge task of regulating and prosecuting and working to remake the norms, but the alternative — to choose a villain and simply hate them with a passion (mine is Philip Green, thank you for asking) — is just a pantomime: enjoyable, but not very enlightening.
Quite so. We need the new thinking that remakes the norms. My contribution was The Courageous State. And this blog. There will be more next year.
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And this blog signals a good time to thank you for running this site throughout 2011, Richard, and the many, many, stimulating, interesting, and down-right anger inducing subjects you cover. Have an excellent Xmas and New Year.
Seconded!
Thirded(?)
Thanks for allowing me a venue to vent, it helps keep the blood pressure down.
Of mice and crowds: in his column ‘The Great Real Estate Bust of 2008’ from December 2008 Robert Shiller said this:
“Moreover, the extreme weakening and then tightening of credit standards seems particularly prominent only in the US, while the housing boom-bust cycle is prevalent throughout much of the world. The precipitating factor that led to the current situation has to do with our evolving world culture, spread rapidly through enhanced media outlets and the Internet, and its perceptions of the markets. It has to do with the deep admiration of markets that has developed during the boom, in line with the ‘efficient markets theory’ in academic finance. It became widely believed that financial markets are such sublime poolers of information that they represent a collective judgment that transcends that of any mere mortal. James Surowiecki’s bestselling 2004 book, with the outrageous title The Wisdom of Crowds, pressed this idea forward at the very height of the real estate boom.”
Have a good Christmas and New Year. Don’t forget to change at Melton Constable.
Unless heading for Yarmouth Beach
On behalf of the hundreds of pensioners, many living alone, who were cheated into transfering their life savings to the Isle of Man (and will take a lasting anger to their graves) we join together to wish you a …
VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A POWERFUL NEW YEAR
You are shining a bright light into the drakness of tax havens, the City and the murky financial services industry that supports them. You have opened our eyes to an iniquitous, and selfish few who are prepared to ransack the world in the name of greed.
Thank you for all you are doing: God bless you Richard.