Insider dealing; laundering drug money; evading sanctions against rogue states; taking over companies to load them up with debt, and raiding their pension funds; designing products that were doomed to fail in order to bet on them failing, or taking insurance out on other businesses’ products failing, and helping to undermine them so as to cash in; mis-selling mortgages and payment protection insurance (mostly useless but very profitable); credit rating agencies having a financial interest in the companies they are rating; fixing interest rates on interbank lending so as to conceal banks’ true position and maximise profits; engaging in trades that would make short-term gains while undermining long-term growth; forcing small business borrowers out of business so as to get their property and sell it …

Are these practices criminal? Many are not actually illegal, amazing though it may seem, and hence not officially criminal, though we might regard them as such. In the case of tax, avoidance is not illegal, but evasion is illegal; or as former Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey put it, the difference is ‘the thickness of a prison wall’. It’s hard to tell when business is allowed so much secrecy. (Interestingly, though, many important models in mainstream economic theory assume that people have perfect information.) New and evermore ingenious ways of avoiding or evading tax are continually being dreamt up by teams of experts, many of them in major accountancy and audit firms, indeed this is a competitive strategy. My colleague Bob Jessop calls it ‘criminnovation’.

That many of these practices are not illegal speaks volumes about the capture of the state and the regulatory system by the financial sector. Daniel Kaufmann, President of the Revenue Watch Institute and a former Director at the World Bank speaks of ‘legal corruption’. This refers to