Those responsible for Basel II should have been made yesterday’s men years ago

Sir, in “The return of yesterday´s men”, February 5, you hold that Jean-Claude Juncker, Martin Schulz and Guy Verhofstadt “will not strike many as representing a genuine choice… for the presidency of the European Commission”. And that is so because these gentlemen represent “a familiar orthodoxy of elite driven integration….that sounds tired and irrelevant to millions of citizens whose lives have been turned upside down by [among other] the collapse of banks”.

Yes, you are most probably correct in your assessment, but why have you not gone out and criticized in a similar way the members of the Basel Committee or of the Financial Stability Board? They with their utterly failed Basel II have had a much more direct role in causing the collapse of banks.

If there had been any type of accountability all these experts would since long be “yesterday’s men”. Instead, they were put in charge of Basel III and, in some cases, like with Mario Draghi, even promoted.

European parliamentarians, why do you allow the eurosceptics to give only their side of the story?

Sir, Guy Verhofstadt and Daniel Cohn-Bendit write that “Eurosceptics are shamelessly exploiting the economic crisis to misrepresent and undermine the EU”, “Europe needs to renew its vows for federal union” October 10. 

But, gentlemen, European parliamentarians, why do you allow them to do so? It was primarily crazy bank regulations which allowed the banks to give credit to “the infallibles” with zero or very little capital, which created the monstrous debts and bank exposures that have caused this crisis. 

Had the banks needed to have as much capital when lending to someone AAA-rated, a European sovereigns, or Spanish real estate sector, as what they were required to have when lending to a small European businesses and entrepreneurs, this crisis that now threatens Europe, would not have happened. It is as easy as that! And your silence on that is deafening.