Warner agrees that Ms Rowling's creation is a different sort of commercial property, one with long-term potential that could be damaged by a typical Hollywood marketing blitz, says Diane Nelson, the studio's global brand manager for Harry Potter.

ECONOMIST: Harry Potter and the publishing goldmine

Correlations also tend to go up when property companies chase the same sort of tenants and locations: a portfolio of city-centre office buildings full of blue-chip banks looked stable until the crisis.

ECONOMIST: Prime numbers

But a side effect of Napster was to allow music aficionados with lots of time to sort through a huge amount of intellectual property and promote the songs and artists they thought were worthy.

FORBES: Why The Demise Of SOPA Is Good For Brands

The city's congestion nightmare would ease at a stroke, much valuable property would be freed for the sort of things that London does best and an entire tier of competition to misgovern the city would be eliminated.

ECONOMIST: Oracle speaks

Yet one can't help but think that if the millions spent on such meetings were available to microcapitalists of the sort that Hernando de Soto of Peru tries to vest with private-property rights in struggling parts of the planet, we wouldn't have call for many more Sustainable Development summits.

FORBES: Talk isn't cheap

But more important, central banks should not ignore another sort of inflation: in the prices of assets, such as shares and property.

ECONOMIST: Trapped by the bubble

Transforming the property into the ultra-luxe resort it is now was a Pharaonic undertaking, the sort of extreme effort (Formula 1 racing, parachute skiing) celebrated in the Red Bull magazine, Red Bulletin.

FORBES: A Fiji Paradise Created By The Inventor Of Red Bull

Measures needed to legitimize private property, free enterprise, repatriation of profits, etc. must be swiftly enacted and the sort of half-steps and bureaucratic impediments to dismantling the command economy favored heretofore by Gorbachev dispensed with.

CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: Center For Security Policy