Paranoia

As I have said elsewhere these figures need to be put into the perspective of the sheer size of the total market. If that is done they actually indicate that fraud is relatively small in comparison. This doesn't mean we ignore it, merely that it is not a panic levels - remember that one man, Bernard Madoff, managed to make a lot more than this. And fraudsters will always be with us. If, on the other hand, people do believe that these figures are too high then they should ask why they are so high after 25yrs of Regulation. At no point does anyone question the role and competence of the FSA in all this. I would suggest that the annual cost of compliance in this country is in the order to £2bn - so industry is losing as much through regulation as by fraud - and there is absolutely no evidence that the fraud figure would be any different if the current regulatory regime did not exist. There is NO evidence.

Posted by: Glen McKeown