Rules, leverage and the fall of man

By Julian Delasantellis

There is a story of an 18th century Frenchwoman, an enthusiastic and purposeful fan of the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, and of that peculiar sport's head cheerleader, Madame de la Guillotine. At the 1793 execution of Marie Antoinette, like a Los Angeles Lakers fan sharing courtside seats with Jack Nicholson and the rest of the beautiful people, she bragged at how near she was to the action.

"I was standing so close," the fan beamed. "I could hear the whisper of the axe."

Fast forward to today, and even though I was eight time zones away, on late Wednesday afternoon I heard the whisper of the axe come down on a third of a century of the history of the capitalist world - the era of deregulation.