Via FT.com / Columnists / John Plender – Ditch theory and take away the punchbowl:
There are, by now, a thousand and one ideas in circulation on how to change the regulatory architecture of finance. But what about changing the central bankers – or at the very least their mindset, since their notions about how to deal with bubbles have proved extraordinarily costly for the rest of us.
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Note, too, that the new breed of economists in central banks have been doggedly wedded to the idea that markets are efficient, despite the recurrence of bubbles throughout history – a phenomenon that makes a nonsense of this belief. And their focus was largely on consumer prices rather than asset prices which did the damage.
