In the high-profile run-off between British politicians on the Treasury select committee and the heavyweights of the private equity world, the industry has been granted something of a reprieve.
The inquiry will now publish only an interim report before the summer recess, expected to consist mainly of factual evidence, while the full report will not appear until after parliament returns in October with the committee likely to hold further hearings.
But the showdowns in Portcullis House have raised a broader concern.
The City might lie just a couple of miles from Westminster, writes Gillian Tett in the FT. But in cultural terms, it could be Pluto – as far as many legislators are concerned.
The sentiment, she says, is mutual.
For while the financial whizzkids there are often familiar with the streets of Tokyo, New York or Hong Kong, many have never visited Westminster. Indeed, they are apt to regard the workings of British policymakers as irrelevant, if not inane.
Such an information gulf is not new. But it is arguably wider than ever before. Modern MPs have little practical experience of working in the financial world. According to the Industry and Parliament Trust, a charitable foundation, only one in five politicians is listed in official records as having any business background at all.
A second problem, writes Tett, is the way the City has developed.
The money machine has mutated into a vast, shadowy, multi-headed hydra. Thus, City activity no longer revolves simply around loans or shares. Instead, the single most profitable and fastest-growing sector is “over-the-counter” derivatives — or private deals involving ultra-complex financial instruments that can be fiendishly hard to understand.
Radical shifts have occurred in the system of finance that have been almost entirely unnoticed by the outside world – far less understood. If MPs are supposed to be overseeing the UK, then it behoves (at least some of) them to try to understand a sector that is propping up so much economic activity in the country, she argues.
That information gulf, and the potential for resulting tension, has been on show in the private equity hearings. But unless the MPs venture a couple of miles east to the City or even closer to Mayfair, and the City whizzkids start engaging more actively with British policymakers, Tett thinks the current showdown may simply be a foretaste of a much bigger battle to come.