More than market forces government intervention forces need to be tempered

Sir, Ian Buruma writes "If the new elites in the global economy want to stave off the storm of destructive hatred, they had better to come up with some ideas of their own on how to temper the market forces", "Global forces are uniting populists against the elites", December 14.

I do not presume forming part of any elite but yet I need to question that our current problems are derived from allowing too much market forces to reign. I suggest there is plenty of evidence which points in the opposite direction.

For instance, our banks are now subject to risk weighted capital requirements, which translates directly into allowing these to earn much higher risk adjusted returns on equity on assets deemed as “safe”, than on assets deemed as risky. It beats me to know what this has to do with markets.

And then we have the whole TARP and Quantitative Easing affairs, and which in all truth might point to an urgent need to temper the intervention by governments in the markets.