And the system allows it to proliferate. We’re not sure if this is a sermon or a film promotion but Dr Doom has some interesting points to make about money grabbing bankers.

Project Syndicate: Teaching morality and values in business schools will not tame such behavior, but changing the incentives that reward short-term profits and lead bankers and traders to take excessive risks will. The bankers and traders of the latest crisis responded rationally to compensation and bonus schemes that allowed them to assume a lot of leverage and ensured large bonuses, but that were almost guaranteed to bankrupt a large number of financial institutions in the end.

To avoid such excesses, it is not enough to rely on better regulation and supervision, for three reasons:

· Smart and greedy bankers and traders will always find ways to circumvent new rules;

· CEOs and boards of directors of financial firms – let alone regulators and supervisors – cannot effectively monitor the risks and behaviors of thousands of separate profit and loss centers in a firm, as each trader and banker is a separate P&L with its own capital at risk;

· CEOs and boards are themselves subject to major conflicts of interest, because they don’t represent the true interest of their firms’ ultimate shareholders.

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All very acute; he then goes on to say how the problems of reckless leverage, securitization and inbuilt conflicts will all conspire to help greedy b**tards make it repeat endlessly. Unless regulators manage to extract their fingers from their posteriors and sort the fundamentals out.

Guess we’re all doomed then.