They were badly misled............................

     Since the crisis, many have been tempted to play the game of deciding who was to blame for such a disastrous outcome.  But blaming individuals is counterproductive - it leads you to think that if just a few, or indeed many, of those people were punished then we would never experience a crisis again.  If only it were that simple.  A generation of the brightest and best were lured into banking, and especially into trading, by the promise of immense financial rewards and by the intellectual challenge of the work that created such returns.  They were badly misled.  The crisis was a failure of a system, and the ideas that underpinned it, not of individual policy-makers or bankers, incompetent and greedy though some of them undoubtedly were. There was a general misunderstanding of how the world economy worked.  Given the size and political influence of the banking sector, is it too late to put the genie back in the bottle?  No - it is never too late to ask the right questions, and in this book I try to do so.


-Mervyn King,   The End of Alchemy:  Money, Banking, and the Future of the Global Economy