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I am always wary of someone who either opens or closes a letter with a Latinism. From experience, it implies that the letter's arguments are portentous enough to merit especially serious consideration, when the reverse is usually the case.
So it was with a keen eye last week that I read, then re-read, the letter in Money Marketing from Andrew Tait, chairman of the Home Buyers' Advisory Service, in which he quotes Cicero as saying: "Who watches over those who watch over us?"
Actually, it wasn't Cicero at all, but the Roman satirist Juvenal who coined the phrase, although the context in which Tait uses it appears much earlier in Plato's Republic, written in 360BC.
None of this would matter much were it not for the fact that Tait's misquoting of Plato follows his equally inaccurate claims about the role of the FSA over missold endowments in the period between 1988 and the mid-1990s when sales tailed off.
Tait uses evidence given to the Treasury select committee by the FSA in late 2003 for its report into endowments, finally published in March the following year.
He alleges that the regulator made "three major errors". First, it advised MPs, and others, that the losses of endowment mortgage borrowers could come to pound 40bn. Second, it...