“We need to learn how to fail”

Sir, in the first session of IFC’s and World Bank’s “Building Competitiveness” FPD Forum 2011, April 4, titled “Youth, Employment, and Revolution in the Middle East, Amr Shady, the CEO of T.A. Telecom of Egypt, said something like: “US entrepreneurs know how to fail, our entrepreneurs need to learn the skill of failure, so to have access to the resources we can pivot into successes”... That should be applicable to South Africa too.

That is a message that should urgently be conveyed to the Basel Committee for Banking Supervision and the Financial Stability Board where they keep insisting on raising the incentives for banks to lend to what is officially perceived as not risky and to avoid like plague what is officially perceived as risky. With it, instead of having the banks fish for something important and productive in risky deep waters, they make them waste their time fishing in unproductive triple-A rated shallow waters... where they nonetheless overcrowd and drown.

PS. Please free us from imprudent risk aversion