Without fear and without favour we need to punish the regulators!

Sir, John Authers in “Home to roost” July 27 quotes William Poole, governor of the St Louis Fed in reference to the current subprime woes saying “The punishment has been meted out to those who have done misdeeds and made bad judgments”. Forget it, soon it is going to be time to punish the real brains behind this mess, namely the bank regulators that displaying an amazing lack of wisdom, empowered a couple of credit rating agencies with so much say over the markets. Had it no been for some haphazardly awarded credit ratings the not subprime but criminally irresponsible behaviour of some mortgage brokers would have been contained in a couple of banks and not leveraged into the problem it now represents.

On your front page the same day there is also a report by Francesco Guerrera and David Wighton on “US executives find favours to analyst can secure better ratings” and honestly anyone who could be surprised by this have not walked the streets enough to be a regulator. Sir look around you and you could find more courses on how to obtain a good rating than on how to manage your real business. This all is lunacy and we are being set up for even bigger disasters and it must end, before it ends us. We need urgently to punish the regulators, at least on the count of being very naive.