The first thing we do, let's kill all the MBAs. Had Shakespeare been writing Henry VI today, there's no doubt that masters of business administration would surpass lawyers as the vilest curse on the ordinary man. After all, what has this modern tribe of Power Point-presenting, spreadsheet-making, derivative-spewing drones done lately but drive the global economy into a very deep ditch?

I write as one in possession of an MBA from the Harvard Business School. Unfortunately, these days it's more like a scarlet letter than a union card to the financial elite. At Merrill Lynch, two Harvard MBAs in succession, Stan O'Neal and John Thain, oversaw the fall of a firm once known and feared as the Thundering Herd. Andy Hornby, who was on deck for the HBOS's near-collapse, is a Harvard Business School alumnus. General Motors' CEO Rick Wagoner is another.

Up until last month, President George W Bush, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and the Securities Exchange Commission chairman, Christopher Cox, formed an embarrassing Harvard Business School trinity of financial ruin.

I recall in my first term at Harvard, in the autumn of 2004, being taught by a professor of leadership who had a sideline advising Sir Fred Goodwin at RBS. Goodwin was frequently mentioned in class as a model of the modern "change manager". Billions of pounds of losses and one near-nationalisation later, Goodwin's change model looks less appealing.

And we haven't even got to the hundreds of anonymous hedge fund managers, investment bankers and traders, who willfully poisoned the financial system over the past decade and waltzed away with fees and bonuses they will never be forced to repay, even after shunting the clean-up costs onto their governments. Many of these individuals possessed MBAs from Harvard.

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/46584,opinion,mba-the-letters-that-spell-financial-ruin-at-harvard