Where the buck really needs to reach

Sir, David Hale in “The Credit crunch and the quandary of the Fed” August 14, is just another one in the long line of commenter on the current financial turmoil that refuse to apportion responsibilities where they should go. For instance when he says that “the rating agencies facilitated the boom by giving high credit scores to securities with loans of dubious quality” the facilitated is by all means an understatement since they in fact have a great responsibility for that boom. Mind you, not that the “buck” should stop with the credit rating agencies. In the first line of responsibility, without any doubt, are those regulators that instructed and even in some cases ordered the market participants to stop thinking for themselves and heed the expert opinion of the credit rating agencies.

If we don’t realize all this and furiously back-peddle from our current setup, if we survive this turmoil, we will not do so the next time around. There is just too much systemic risk fabrication going around.