Lord (Adair) Turner
... There clearly are bits of the financial system, and particularly the bits that relate to fixed income securities, trading, derivatives, hedging, but possibly also aspects of the asset management industry and equity trading, which have grown beyond a socially reasonable size ...
It is hard is to distinguish between valuable financial innovation and non-valuable. Clearly, not all innovation should be treated in the same category as the innovation of either a new pharmaceutical drug or a new retail format. I think that some of it is socially useless activity. On the other hand, I don't know whether that means the world would have been better off without any credit default swaps, or simply some credit default swaps. I just think it's difficult to work out where one can draw the line with this. And that leads me away from the idea that regulators should be saying: product X bad, product Y good, and more towards a set of mechanisms such as high capital requirements which create hurdles for new products, but do not stop those that are of obvious value."
John Gapper (FT)
A $58m fee paid to Goldman Sachs was no more than "a kind of alchemy ... less to ensure the best possible deal for the client than to make them believe they are getting it."