Now let us connect urgently the lessons learned with the what to do.

Sir, Desmond Lachman, in “America’s subprime blues have historical echoes” August 3, is absolutely right when he says “At the heart of today’s subprime crisis is the unfortunate interaction of financial innovation gone awry, inept market regulation [by which we might presume he also refers to inept regulators] and a failure of the rating agencies to exercise their fiduciary responsibility to protect the average investor.” By the way the credit rating agencies would probably argue that part about “fiduciary responsibility” since they way they describe it, they only give opinions in accordance with their freedom of expression rights.

Now what Desmond Lachman does not yet do, is to connect the lessons learned with the what to do. As I see it and following that old advice of when in a hole stop digging, the first thing we have to do is clearly to recall all the empowerment awarded to the financial fortune tellers, the credit rating agencies, to dictate so much about where the financial flows can or should not go. Let us pray that the current problems are just a minor tremor that serves us as a warning and that we still have time to runaway from construing a financial system on top of a systemic fault that if we do not amend will produce mind-boggling catastrophes.

PS. "minor tremor"? The 2008 Global financial crisis GFC