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WORLD VIEW:RETROSPECTION IS the way to understanding, we are discovering so painfully during what the IMF described this week as “by any measure . . . the deepest global recession since the Great Depression”. Why was it not more commonly seen coming? What lessons can be learned from that when organising future safeguards? asks PAUL GILLESPIE

In a speech this week in Yale university Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times, asked what responsibility journalists in the financial media have for not foreseeing it. He mentioned four main reasons – ahead of which he said by way of mitigation that journalists were not the only ones so to fail. Political and business leaders, regulators and economists all fell down on this job, as can now be seen in retrospect. Since these are principal decision-makers and wielders of power they set and frame the terms on which the media report their activities.