This has created so much uncertainty that many employers have gone to absurd lengths to sanitise their workplaces.

ECONOMIST: The perils of flirtation | The

The system can sanitise the waste of ten people in two hours, leaving only sand and fresh(ish) water behind.

ECONOMIST: Monitor: Flushed with pride | The

Fantasies are a way of rewriting childhood history, sometimes to wreak revenge on abusive or absent adults, sometimes to sanitise memories of them.

ECONOMIST: Sexual fantasies

Ten years after the outbreak, apartment and office blocks still boast of how many times daily they sanitise lift buttons, hand rails, door knobs and almost all public surfaces.

BBC: Sars legacy still felt in Hong Kong, 10 years on

After Garibaldi's death in 1882, an official national cult did its best to sanitise the hero worship, airbrushing away the old hero's biting criticism of poor or corrupt government.

ECONOMIST: Garibaldi

Critics of the Saud family urged the sheikh to express his true beliefs before he died to endorse the Islamic opposition rather than continuing to sanitise a regime it saw as hypocritical and pseudo-Islamic.

ECONOMIST: Sheikh Bin Baz

All of which is perhaps to point out that the terms of the debate about how to sanitise the bloated financial system have been set by a regulatory community whose legitimacy should perhaps have been destroyed but which still seems (amazingly?) to be in loco parentis.

BBC: If banks are treated as naughty kids...