It certainly must be socially useless to have so much lightning-fast yacking traveling at the speed of light.

FORBES: The Financial Transaction Tax Is Bad Business For Europe

His point was that much of the explosive growth in the trading of complex financial products - CDOs, ABSs, CDS, EFTs and so on, until we were all alphabetty crazy - may have been (in his words) socially useless.

BBC: How scary is a financial transactions tax?

Lord Turner has once again tried to put a sizeable bomb under the economic orthodoxy that has determined government and regulatory policies towards banks ( as I noted in my post this morning, a couple of years ago he suggested that a financial transaction tax might be a decent idea, and argued that some financial innovation and trading might well be "socially useless").

BBC: Bank lending 'should be controlled'

Opposition spokesman Lord Eatwell said tax avoidance by businesses "undermines any perception of fairness in the tax system and imposes a dead-weight loss on the economy, by spawning a socially-useless tax avoidance industry".

BBC: Tax avoidance debate