Another great speech by Myners

To the Smith Institute last night, text is here. Goes quite a bit wider than my usual ownership agenda, and some really good stuff in there:

Beliefs in laws of economics and a view of the field as a quasi-natural science instead of a social discipline allowed for a remarkable proliferation in mathematical modelling and the emergence of a dangerous sense that risk could be predicted accurately – or even eliminated. This confidence in markets also blinded us to the limitations of markets and insensitive to the plight of those for whom markets alone could never deliver good solutions....

We can try very hard to understand the way markets will behave. We can look to the past to try to gain an understanding about the way shares and investments may behave in the future. But investing and speculative activities are never more than well-informed guesswork. The unexpected can and will happen – you cannot plan for every eventuality. Any investor (or regulator) that forgets that does so at his or her own peril.

PS. Pesto has blogged about it here.