Moreover, finance has its own cycle – of risk appetite, innovation and occasional crisis. That won’t change. Shann understood that and so must we. The sort of financial system we should want is what was once described as “the hand-maid of industry”: 23 reliably facilitating transactions, fostering trade, bringing savers and investors together, pooling risk and so on.
We don’t actually want too many of the financiers to be “masters of the universe”. There will always be a risky fringe, but it should stay at the fringe, not be at the core. But the man we remember tonight would not want the financial system to be simply an arm of the state either, subject entirely to bureaucratic or political direction.