Values, schmalues, says Bill Gates. This crisis was about overspending

Values is a very fashionable word here at Davos this week. A lot of people seem to agree with Tony Blair's assessment that the current financial crisis is the result of a neglect of ethical and moral values in the financial world. Bill Gates doesn't.

"I don't think the failure was fundamentally an ethical failure," he said when The Economist's Matthew Bishop asked him about it during a lunch discussion on philanthropy today. "There have been people making money in capricious ways for a long time."

So what was the problem? "There was an abundance of spending. There's an adjustment that's going to take place."