What a very strange start to the year! As usual American stats. illustrate it best: amid talk of a melt-up, the S&P 500 rose by 7% in the first four weeks of 2018, an abrupt correction took it down by 10%, it retraced 70% before suffering another leg down.

There are many, many things that Mr Jeremy Corbyn and I disagree about but I cannot allow his recent comment to pass, For 40 years, deregulated finance has progressively become more powerful…its control of politics [is] pernicious and undemocratic. What planet is this man from? Deregulated? The last time I checked, the FSA’s handbook contained ten sections. The one entitled Prudential Standards was divided into 11 sub-sections. The sub-section Prudential Source Book for banks, building societies and investment companies was made up of 14 sub-sub-sections. The sub-sub-section Market Risk was divided into 11 sub-sub-sub-sections. The sub-sub-sub-section Interest Rates had 66 paragraphs.

In all, at the last count, there were a million paragraphs of regulations in the rule book. MIFID II, which came into force on 3 January, has brought with it from Brussels 1.4 million paragraphs of new rules. It requires trades to be time-stamped to within 100 microseconds, to report trading information in documents that stretch to more than 65 different data fields and to store all this vital information away for five years. Deregulated? The man does not know what he is talking about!