From banking to bad taste, the usual suspect when things go wrong is the culture of an organisation or group. Investigating and fixing cultures has become our main hope of salvation. But this is a convenient distraction from questions of moral responsibility, consequences, and of how people can take mature, constructive steps together to make things a bit better.

The resignation of the Barclays chief, if welcome, should not be allowed to obscure the need for fundamental reform. And Britain - that large hedge-fund with a small country attached - is deeper in need of it than anyone else.

The City's Financial Services Authority has given Barclays Bank a massive fine for lying about its cost of capital in the obscure process that sets a key price in the financial markets. It shows again that finance is too important to be left to the so-called market.

A finance insider reads Soros' intervention at Trento and wonders whether this is just a trading superstar talking up his own portfolio? 

The strongest force holding the Euro together is the political force of creditors. Were the currency to collapse, much of the debt would collapse with it. So the question is, who are we saving the Euro for?

A Brussels forum on June 28 seeks alternatives to the inaction of the European Council on Europe's recession and the restoration of democracy.

The basis of taxation - especially of the super-rich, but also of the increasing numbers who feel no great traditional or ethnic attachment to the nation - must be solidarity, whose only sustainable basis is a common view of the good we're building. The State needs to recognise its duty in supplying that if we are to solve our fiscal crises