It is not as if each successive banking scandal throws up new insights. The proverbial innocent bystander might reasonably suppose that, by now, something would have been learned from the cyclical repetition of egregious behaviour and the crises it generates.

Much of this behaviour contains elements that are just plain foolish. There is the feverish, unbridled credit expansion and lending practices landing banks with mountains of non-performing loans, backed by worthless collateral. Then there are the regulatory follies, and having to publish increasingly garbled financial statements that stray further and further from meaningful management accounts.