From the Editor

Our pages aren’t often given to false modesty. “Even the most bearish failed to foresee the full ramifications of the financial crisis,” we claimed in 2008, before quoting sages who forecast most of it. None of them worked for us.

Hang on though. What about the full-page puff ad we gave ourselves a few days earlier?

“Forewarned is forearmed,” that boasted, reprinting a Lex column from 2001. Back then we mused about banks “selling credit risk through such instruments as credit derivatives and collateralised debt obligations”, so it “ended up in the hands of those least able to analyse it.”

Hooray for us then? Not quite: the ad was inspired by a reader, who’d written in to praise this forgotten column.

“I have never had much faith in the boards of our big companies,” fumed our noble correspondent. “Now it turns out that they don’t even read Lex; or if they do, they don’t understand it.”

Presumably he meant big companies like ours. Sorry.

MEA CULPA

In which an editor explains why governments and big business set the news agenda:

“[T]he crucial point here is that editors are prepared to put warning signs on company coverage or on the front page if they think that things are going wrong - they certainly open up their op-ed page - but if we were to put stories which were warning about worries or doubts about individual companies’ business models, first of all, we would definitely have lawyers on our backs for irresponsible journalism, pure speculation and, second, we have a job to of course report what the governments are saying, what the banks are saying about the state of health of the economy. If you remember, in 2005/2006 everybody thought the City of London was top of the world and I seem to remember certain politicians talking about abolishing boom and bust. We put that on the front page too.”

So that’s alright then…