Mr. Martin Wolf, would not having a climate fix ruin investors even more?

Sir, I do not understand Martin Wolf’s “A climate fix would ruin investors” June 18. If climate change warnings are for real, as Wolf says he believes … would not having a climate fix ruin investors even more?

And what about diversification? If, while fixing the climate, governments go wrong and mess it all up by for instance financing Solyndras and then go broke… would not a little coal mine left in the portfolio perhaps come in handy for those days we might have to mitigate the disaster?

When regulators exorcised primal risk-taking from the banks, they doomed our economies to decadence.

Sir, Edmund Phelps writes that “Nations with once-dynamic economies will be helpless to recover their prosperity as long as they misunderstand what causes economic progress”, "Free innovators from the state’s deadening hand”, January 31.

Indeed before it is realized that primal risk-taking is what leads to innovations and start-ups, and which is what keeps the economy sturdy muscular. Any economic growth based on risk-aversion leads only to economic obesity. Unfortunately, bank regulators, with their loony capital requirements based on ex ante perceived expected losses exorcised such risk taking from the banks.

And Edmund Phelps also correctly states “The state is no better suited to take a big role in the technical innovation than in artistic creation”. But Phelps might not be aware of how bank regulations are stacked in favor of the state assuming such role. Currently when a bank gives a loan to a “risky” innovator, let’s for example call it a Solyndra; it is required to have much much more capital than when lending it to the “infallible sovereign”, and so that instead a bureaucrat can relend that money to an innovator, like a Solyndra.

Private innovation needs government help, but it also needs not to be blocked by regulators

Sir, of course nations need to be bold, and take risks, in order to have a better future. That is, or at least was, why we used to go to our churches and pray “God make us daring!”

And so of course most of us would wholeheartedly support Marianna Mazzucato’s call for more government financed basic research; especially if this resulted from redirecting to it other governmental waste; and this even though we suspect the argument will, as usual, be exploited by those who 

just want to increase taxes, “Why private innovation needs government help”, August 22.

But, that said, the fact is that currently, if a bank lends directly to a innovation project, like the failed solar power company Solyndra in the US, then it is required to hold about 8 percent in capital, but, if it instead lends that money to the government, so that a bureaucrat can relend it to a Solyndra, then it has to hold no risk-weighted capital... which skews all too much in favor of the government.

I do understand the importance of Mazzucato´s call, but, frankly, to me, it is of secondary importance when considered in relation to the fact that bank regulators, with their risk-weighted capital requirements, are effectively castrating our banks, making them sing in fAAAlsetto.