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Hans Morris believes that using visa cards are faster and more convenient than cheques and cash.

There seems to be a consensus within certain sections of the financial industry that the next big story of the worsening credit crunch will be the crisis of personal debt, rather than institutional debt. Many would lay the blame for much of this personal debt at the door of credit cards. Morris will have none of that. He says: "What our business plan calls for, and what we are trying to do, is to get people thinking of Visa cards as better money.

That is, that it is safer, more convenient, more flexible, and so it is a superior form of money and you should use it for purchases over the internet or other places, where it is faster and more convenient than cheques and cash. And that the tools to manage your finances are actually better. It is easier to budget, it has a lot of uses, done responsibly. We are big believers in that, too.

"A lot of what we are emphasising to consumers is managing money intelligently, and we think it is a better tool to do that."

Does he really have no moral problem at all with working at the sharp end of instant lending? No, is the short answer.

"I really believe that what we do is a fantastic service that is highly valued by every family and every person who uses it. If you think about the way the world used to work, and how difficult it was... look, we don't tell you how much you can borrow, and we don't set the rules on how that borrowing should work. If you ask 100 people, you'll find some people who have ruined their lives because of credit cards, but you will find 95 who have not.

I remember when I got out of college, I couldn't get a credit card. And I remember my first credit line was $100. It was ridiculous. As my Dad used to say: going and getting a loan in the late 50s, early 60s, was a very judgmental thing. The credit card is non-judgmental. It is up you. It is up to your character how you handle it.

"Which would you rather? Would you rather someone who wants to borrow has to walk into a bank and put up with a whole load of questions and stuff that they find uncomfortable? Some people find that a very unattractive process. Just like some people abuse the privilege of these cards. It's not judgmental, but you have to use your own judgment."

Alright, alright. Visa cards are a great and a good thing. But let us now forget about them, and instead hear Morris' view of what is going on in the world's economy, how we got here, and when it is going to end. How bad does he think it is going to get?

"My personal view is that the dislocations we are seeing now are the result of a pretty substantial build up in bad practices at many, many levels. That includes bad banking practices, therefore bad borrowing behaviour at the consumer, corporate and government level.

"A lot of people made a misjudgment that is actually the same misjudgment that is always made, which is that they make assumptions about the liquidity of assets, and when things fall apart, all liquidity is correlated.

"Nothing really gets distinguished, and the worse it gets, the more correlated it all becomes. There are many examples of that. Take the mortgage market in the US, where there was a perception that because home mortgages were highly diversified you could in theory make easier credit decisions because you could apply statistical analysis to the likelihood of repayment, and then you could apply that to the large pools, and then you could say ‘we can accurately predict the behaviour of these large pools', and most of those were very, very bad judgments. Because people didn't behave the way it was predicted they would. And there was not enough data to even make those predictions.

And a derivative of that became a situation of enormous complexity in which many investors were really just relying on ratings and a sales pitch. Then throw in a bunch of very poor behaviour, poor underwriting, lying on applications, sloppiness in the packaging, and you create the circumstances in which incentives are very badly placed, and you get to where we are today. The degree to which this all went on is staggering."

Is it the death of capitalism?

"That is ridiculous."

That is lucky, because a Visa card wouldn't be much use in a bartering based economy.

"Untrue. We call ourselves the universal currency! Visa is in effect a bartering tool."

It would be hard to swap a Visa card for a donkey, surely?

Morris sits back in his chair and blinks for a few moments.

"Well, there is an element of barter to it, I mean you can get airmiles when you use it. But at Visa we haven't really addressed the donkey question yet... Look, speculation will happen, people will start thinking that some things are an awfully good buy, and then markets will repair."

Inshallah to that.

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