Only three years earlier, in his Mansion House speech of 18th June 2008, he had been looking back on the period “since the Monetary Policy Committee was set up in 1997” as “the NICE decade” of Non- Inflationary Consistent Expansion. During that period, the market value of the UK housing stock had tripled from £1.3 trillion to £4 trillion. The heroes, whose widely acclaimed ingenuity and enterprise had achieved this apparent gain of £2.7 trillion, were the bankers. In the summer of 2007, the property market began to collapse. Within a year, the credit system almost seized up, and the economy was tipped into recession. The most enthusiastic cheerleaders of one of the greatest pyramid schemes in financial history became its harshest critics. The crisis was widely blamed on the banking and financial sector. Reckless, and occasionally outrageous, behaviour certainly aggravated the crisis; but it was a symptom, not the cause. The real blame lay with the bankruptcy of economic policy. The root cause of bankrupt economic policy was toxic economic theory; and it still is.