One banker contrives a metaphor to defend the universal banking model. If you set two BMW 5 Series cars to race around a track and only one makes it back, that tells you that one of the drivers made a mistake, not that the BMW is a bad car. So don’t junk universal banking, through a forced separation into utility banking, comprising retail deposit-taking and commercial lending, away from trading in securities, just to punish the mistakes of poor chief executives who drove their banks into a wall in the reckless pursuit of profits in complex instruments that they didn’t understand, using leveraged proprietary risk-taking they couldn’t control.

Governments should cede control of fiscal policy.

Markets must soon learn not to react to agency sabre-rattling.

The latest SIV auction has proved a welcome fillip for the structured finance market.

International banks might not get the rich pickings they crave in the People’s Republic.