Is the sharing economy a new form of regulatory arbitrage? That was the question posed by my most popular article this year. Published in January, my take on Uber turned out to be prescient, as the ride sharing company attracted increasing regulatory headwinds around the world. The second most-read new article is actually a pair of investigative stories I wrote towards the end of the year looking at the use of derivatives embedded within UK local authority loans. Unlike the sharing economy, this is an area little covered by the mainstream financial press, but the theme of evading regulation is common to both.

This year I have left pre-2014 articles out of the list but I made an exception for my three-year-old article on regulatory culpability in the failure of Royal Bank of Scotland. The publication of journalist-penned inquests into RBS made that one newly relevant.

Let me take the opportunity to thank you for sending me comments and feedback (please keep it coming), and to wish you the best for 2015.

1. Disruptive business models, Uber and plane crashes
2. Lost Lobos – part one and part two
3. The FSA, RBS and the pack of lies (December 2011)
4. Regulating financial innovation
5. Review of Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know
6. Volcker’s CDO smackdown
7. Basel in America
8. Review of Ian Fraser’s Shredded
9. The mismeasure of finance
10. Investigative financial journalism and the origins of the Devil’s Derivatives