The Spectator

Forget Wall St. The Wolves of Whitehall caused the crash – and could do so again

Greedy, foolish governments got us into the crisis – and they're making the same mistakes now we're getting out

Leonardo diCaprio as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street [Getty Images/Shutterstock/iStock/Alamy] 
issue 18 January 2014

This week, Martin Scorsese’s film The Wolf of Wall Street opened and the Office of National Statistics reported that house prices are up by 12 per cent in London and by 5 per cent across the UK as a whole. While the former represents the cocaine-fuelled greed of bankers, which many like to think caused the financial crisis in the first place, the latter represents a wider form of greed which has even more to do with the problems that have afflicted the world from 2007 onwards.

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