Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.

Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.

Hello and welcome to a free thinking discussion in which we want to find out whether emotion or reason dictates what happens in the financial markets.

We're inside that enduring symbol of city life, a bowler hat, into which we've been kindly invited for the culmination of the city of London Festival.

In a nod to 21st century children's culture, this bowler hat is inflatable, as you can probably

hear, and I suspect it may double as a bouncy castle for the banking classes. We're also close under the walls of St. Paul's Cathedral,

so any bells you hear above the sound of the fans will be from the second largest bells in the world in the Northwest Tower,

summoning the bankers to heaven or hell.

Around the table with me are Francis Hudson, the global thematic strategist at Standard Life.

Greg Davis, head of behavioral and investment philosophy at Barclays.

Daniel Ben Ami, journalist and author of cowardly capitalism, the myth of the global financial casino.

Daniel also wrote Ferraris for all, a proposition we might all agree with.

And finally, Adrian Waldrich, who writes the Shumpeter column in The Economist,

and is co-author of the Fourth Revolution, The Global Race to Reinvent the State.

Adrian, you think we're at a particular moment in the story of Western capitalism,

possibly even a crisis. What makes you come to that conclusion?

My worries are about the state rather than about markets at the moment.

My worry is that the state is not fit for purpose, that we have too many entitlements,

that we've overloaded

democratic systems with expectations that we can't meet, and that the state is perhaps,

the Western state has perhaps been out-maneuvered or out-thought by authoritarian modernising

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