“A third threat is the growing complexity (and sloppiness) of statute law, a grave problem on both sides of the Atlantic as the mania for elaborate regulation spreads through the political class. I agree with the American legal critic Philip

“A fourth threat – especially apparent in the United States – is the mounting cost of the law. By this I do not mean the $94.5 billion a year that the US federal government spends on law making, law interpretation

“Instead of exhausting ourselves drawing up hopelessly complex codes of ‘macro-prudential’ or ‘counter-cyclical’ regulation, let us go back to Bagehot’s world, where individual prudence – rather than mere compliance  was the advisable course, precisely because the authorities were powerful and

“And the combination of concentration, interbank lending, financial innovation and technological acceleration makes it a system especially prone to crash. Once again, however, the difference between the natural world and the financial world is the role of regulation. Regulation is

“Those today who dismiss Western democracy as ‘broken’ – and I hear their lamentations with growing frequency – are wrong to yearn for some kind of Beijing model of a one-party state in which decisions are taken by technocrats on

“As I have suggested, it was the most-regulated institutions in the financial system that were in fact the most disaster-prone: big banks on both sides of the Atlantic, not hedge funds. It is more than a little convenient for America’s

“In a 2011 survey, Porter and his colleagues asked HBS alumni about 607 instances of decisions on whether or not to offshore operations. The United States retained the business in just ninety-six cases (16 per cent) and lost it in

“It is not technology that has hollowed out civil society. It is something Tocqueville himself anticipated, in what is perhaps the most powerful passage in Democracy in America. Here, he vividly imagines a future society in which associational life has