'Holy moley!! Out go the invisible hand.' (Pat Gunning) If that's all that is bothering Pat Gunning, he should relax. The invisible hand was never 'in'. It is a modern 20th-century campus myth that attributes the invisible hand of markets to Adam Smith despite him never crediting the metaphor with anything like the mysterious powers that it has been given by, among others, three Nobel prize winners, most of our profession and those they influence in the media. Like the Emperor's Clothes, it is a fable agreed upon, especially when it is linked to markets, which Adam Smith certainly never did. It is not mentioned in Books I and II of Wealth Of Nations where Smith discusses how markets work; he mentioned it once in Book IV in relation to risk-avoidance behaviour, after clearly describing how traders reacted to the risks of foreign trade - they invested locally instead, and because the sum of the parts (locally invested) added to a greater total local investment, the result was, er, greater total local investment. This is about arithmetic, not theories, concepts, paradigms, mystical body parts, or divine interventions. Gavin Kennedy