ICAEW annual policy summit: Letting a good crisis go to waste?

Rob Lewis reports from the ICAEW annual policy summit.

That cunning instructor of Italian princes, Niccolo Machiavelli, once taught his young rulers that policy was never something one should get caught out on. Complete flexibility, rather than passionate conviction, was the key to survival. The near-collapse of the western financial system has not yet seen the ICAEW led to the scaffold, but as the Institute's annual policy summit showed last week, citizens will have a hard job proving it ever espoused anything that could have contributed to the crisis.