So, on Wednesday, when the Cern Large Hadron Collider was switched on, the world was not sucked into a man-made black hole on the Franco Swiss border – as had been predicted by those in advanced stages of hellenologophobia (the scientific name for a fear of scientific terminology, if that’s not too paradoxical, or cruel). On the same day, though, many investors in Lehman Brothers’ complex debt instruments probably felt their money really had disappeared into a black hole. And several senior Lehman executives probably wished they had, too.

All of which leads me to wonder whether in financial engineering, as in ‘big bang’ research, we aren’t trying to be too clever for own good.