November 13, 2008

Do you allow Mr. Trichet to get away with it?

Sir if a president of the European Central Bank can now get away with blaming the investors for the crisis as “they put full faith in the ability of rating agencies to draw up risk assessments” like Jean-Claude Trichet does in “Macroeconomic policy is essential to stability” November 13, then Europe has a bigger problem than what I thought possible.

Either Mr. Trichet is shamelessly ignoring the role of the central bankers and the bank regulators, thru the Basel Committee, played in empowering the credit rating agencies; by naming these to have their ratings decide how much capital the banks should have, or, if he does not know that, so much the worse. At least Greenspan admitted some responsibility.

Central Bankers and regulators themselves trusted the credit rating agencies too much as their sentries for the risk-watch, while they went to sleep. To have one of the recently awakened sleeping beauties advice us on what has to be corrected, seems a bit dangerous, to say the least.