Thank you for downloading the 2012 BBC Reith Lectures.

This year's lectures, titled The Rule of Law and its Enemies,

are given by the economic historian Professor Neil Ferguson.

The presenter is Sue Lawley.

Hello and welcome to New York for the second of this year's BBC Reith Lectures.

We're at the city's oldest museum, the New York Historical Society, which for 200

years has been exploring and explaining the history of this dynamic metropolis. The USA is the academic

headquarters of this year's lecturer, Neil Ferguson, who is a professor of history at Harvard. His

subject is the rule of law and its enemies.

His argument set out in his first lecture is that Western civilization, dominant for the last

500 years, now faces a crisis as the institutions that made it so powerful begin to fail.

Today, in his second lecture, he's wading into the heart

of things with his controversial views on the recent near collapse of our banking system,

the first signs of which were, of course, seen here in the United States with the failure

of the subprime mortgage market. As people cry out for more regulation to prevent it all happening again,

he comes up with a rather different view. To give us his historical analysis of what he

calls the Darwinian economy, please welcome Neil Ferguson. What is the biggest problem facing the world economy today?

To listen to some people, you might think the correct answer is insufficient financial regulation.

According to a number of influential commentators, the origins of the financial crisis that

began in 2007 and still doesn't seem to be over lie in decisions dating back to the early

1980s that led to a substantial deregulation of financial markets.

In the good old days, we're told, banking was boring.

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