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

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.

The Wolf of Wall Street is no fantasy.  While the behaviour of the antihero, Jordan Belfort, has been ratcheted up for the purposes of Hollywood, the story reflects a genuine sickness at the heart of high finance: its tendency to attract, and tolerate, psychopaths. The theory is that bank directors can use them as truffle hunters use pigs: harness their hunger, then pull them away before they do too much damage.