Snooties abound

Sir FT’s front page November 30 voices Peer Steinbrück’s, Germany’s finance minister, accusation that bankers are “snooty”. Of course he must be right, almost by definition but, before he throws the first stone, he does well looking closer at those nearer to him. If “snootiness”, a word that I never heard before but immediately felt intimate with, has to apply to anyone I would have to say it is to all the bank regulators who in self congratulatory ways thought they hade tamed the risk in banking for ever with all their Basel inventions.