The leader we need

The latest news in the financial crisis is that, after weeks of blame-calling by all parties — generally misdirected, as Dennis Sewell argues in our cover story — a single culprit has at last been identified. It is human nature — that incorrigible force which makes us want too much of a good thing when it is within easy reach, and makes us dangerously complacent about risk when the going is good. It was human nature that made bankers behave irresponsibly when their judgment was warped by the temptation of giant bonuses; it made homebuyers and credit-card holders overreach themselves when they were offered too much cheap credit; it made politicians overborrow and encourage market folly when they thought it would buy them electoral popularity.

In the midst of a financial cataclysm like nothing we have experienced in our lifetimes — in which mighty banks, suddenly starved of liquidity and swept by rumour, have been falling by the day, and more will surely follow in the weeks to come — it is sufficient for now to declare that we are all at fault, we should all have seen it coming, we will all have to share the pain.