Over the weekend I met a man who very recently, in a matter of weeks, lost two billion dollars of other people's money... as well as a large share of his own fortune. Speculation: I wouldn't have had the opportunity to encounter him, a charming and good person I was happy to meet, if rather than in London we were in Tokyo... or Saudi Arabia, which does not share Japan's tradition of self-service.

Quite apart from that, I had dinner on Saturday with an economist friend who'd attended the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year. He was to appear on a panel along with former US Secretary of the Treasury Alan Greenspan to discuss some aspects of the global economy. Greenspan, however, upstaged him and the other participants in an unusual way... by giving his presentation via hologram, transported in from a high-tech studio in DC. It reminds one... Greenspan should long ago have stopped encouraging people to believe he is God. He kept interest rates too low for far too long, and ignored warnings about dangers in the mortgage market.

My economist friend here adds "And as with God only part of the audience saw him (with the hologram you can only see 120 degrees...)"