Powerful groups often maintain their position by minimizing attention to certain issues. Policy change requires attention from policymakers and other interested participants but such attention is a rare commodity: a policymaker can only consider so many issues, a newspaper can contain only a handful of headlines and the public will only pay fleeting attention to politics. Power is exercised to make sure that important issues do not arrive at the top of the policy agenda.


The rules and regulations of banking are obscure and difficult for most of us to understand; banking rarely received critical attention when the economy was booming; issues such as banking bonuses have often been defended as a private matter (at least until governments bailed out certain banks); and, critics of the regulatory system have found it difficult (until recently) to be heard within government circles.