Between the opinions of Vaclav Klaus and Kevin Rudd I am all for the first

Sir Kevin Rudd the Australian prime minister holds that “Leaders must act together to solve the crisis” January 8, because “Fragmented responses could yield to policies that run the risk of accelerating rather than ameliorating the crisis”. This is a bad argument since there is very little to assure us that a coordinated official response would not do exactly the same.

For someone like myself who for years now have fought the efforts of regulators to impose a coordinated global oversight on risks by using some few credit rating agencies it is clear that I prefer the much humbler attitude in reference to the value of government interferences expressed yesterday by the President of the European Union Vaclav Klaus in “Do not tie the markets – free them”.

Viva the President of the European Union!

Sir though I do not agree with his laisser faire attitude towards the climate change I must express my deepest thanks to Vaclav Klaus for giving reason a voice and blaming the “immodest and overconfident politicians playing with the market” for the current economic crisis, “Do not tie the markets – free them” January 7.

His words remind me of those uttered by the Joker (in the name of the free market) in the movie The Dark Knight, 2008. “You know, they're schemers. Schemers trying to control their worlds. I'm not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are. It's the schemers that put you where you are. I just did what I do best. I took your little plan and I turned it on itself. Look what I did to this city with a few…” collateralized debt obligations.When I think of a small group of bureaucratic finance nerds in Basel thinking themselves capable of exorcizing risks out of banking, for ever, by cooking up silly formulas of minimum capital requirements for banks based on some vaguely defined risks of default; and thereafter creating a risk information oligopoly empowering the credit rating agencies and which doomed, sooner or later, the world to be guided over a precipice of systemic risks; like what happened with the lousily awarded mortgages to the subprime sector, I cannot but shiver when I hear about giving even more advanced powers to the schemers.

What is at risk is our freedom to do what needs to be done.

Sir, Vaclav Klaus in “What is at risk is not the climate but freedom” June 14, is both wrong and right. Wrong in the sense that the fact that people could be ordered by governments to build levees and do things do protect themselves and their children for the future has nothing to do with “replacing the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central planning” and sublimely right in that an abusive exploitation of our environmental emergencies by an often hypocritical green clergy could definitely infringe on our freedom to do what needs to be done.