Those who suggest that greed was the cause of the current crisis remind me of those who suggest that gravity is the cause of airplane accidents. The problem with a focus on values, common in the literature about leadership, is that allows for quick diagnosis but provides no prescription. One cannot regulate values. I hope that the new wave of regulations accepts people as they are, but expects the most important of our firms to evolve to institutions.

This in turn means that each of them must have a Purpose beyond mere profit and to be constituted in a way that allows it to serve it.

Nobody has spoken more eloquently about the Purpose of a constitution, the preeminent regulation, than Emanuel Kant who wrote “…

“The problem of organizing a state, however hard it may seem, can be solved even for a race of devils, if only they are intelligent. The problem is: Given a multitude of rational beings requiring universal laws for their preservation, but each of whom is secretly inclined to exempt himself from them, to establish a constitution in such a way that, although their private intentions conflict, they check each other, with the result that their public conduct is the same as if they had no such intentions.”