Could our economic weapons be slightly passé?

Sir Samuel Brittan’s “We have defences against a slump” January 18 reads like a brilliant general discussing what to do in the current war, with the weapons from the last war. Our problem now is that we have not yet been able to really identify the exact strain of the current economic hardship’s virus so as to know what could best work.

For instance, nothing of those reckless borrowing and reckless lending in the subprime mortgage sector would have gone anywhere had it not been for the credit rating agencies having been appointed as financial commissars by our bank regulators. Does this now mean we have to start by radically extirpating these agents from our system or do treatments suffice?