Following the global financial crisis, many countries have embarked on fundamental reviews of their regulatory systems in an attempt to identify the causes of the near collapse in financial systems and to pave the way for a new approach to regulation. The focus of this paper concerns the intellectual assumptions on which previous regulatory approaches have largely been built, both in the UK and in a number of other countries. We examine the analysis provided by the UK’s Turner Review (2009) which follows the “market failure” approach to regulation and we contrast this with the alternative “state failure” approach. Both approaches only offer partial and polarised views into the causes of the crisis. We offer a synthesis and argue that a new conceptual approach to the management of financial markets is required. The essence of this new approach is the recognition that the state and regulation are not external to the market. While this paper largely relates to the UK, it provides potentially important lessons for many other countries.