Indeed moderation needs to be sustained…but it better be the right kind.

Sir Stephen Cechetti wrote “We need to sustain the great moderation”, June 23, 2008 and I initially thought he meant a “from-now-on”. To my big surprise, reading it I then saw that he refers to the period 1985 to 2005 when the $500bn in home mortgages grew to $9,500bn, signifying debts of about 7 months of the current GDP, and of which $7,500bn was used for securities, as the “moderation” that with some minor tweaking, needs to be sustained.

On what planet does he live? As I see it the most important result of that boom was to make the USA even more energy dependent, in the midts of an environmental threath, and luring many babyboomers to anticipate their current consumption.

Can you imagine how much better the US would have been off if those $9,000bn had gone to infrastructure investments that prepared the US for the new realities?

But of course that could never have happened when the bank regulators all they care about is to stop the banks from defaulting… no matter where the rest of the country ends up.

Indeed moderation needs to be sustained…but it better be the right kind.

What we first need is an insurance that covers the risks of the discoveries.

Sir, Stephen Cechetti argues in “A future of public healthcare for all” July 3 that the advances in genetics and that will be able to provide for better individualized projections of expected health costs will translate into a market failure that will force the private health insurance system into the arms of the public sector. Actually it is not a market failure that will do so since in fact the market could only benefit from knowing more about the risks, it is the market results that will be unacceptable, or at least let us hope so, since if those prognosed as much healthier sneak out from sharing the risks, society could turn much much nastier. For instance, there is nothing to stop a good health prognosis to also influence such variables as the admittance to universities.

Before we put any new safeguard system in place, which will certainly only happen when it is much too late for many, what we most need is an insurance that covers the risks of whatever extra costs we could suffer because of what they discover in our genes, and have everyone subscribe such an insurance, before they are allowed to take any genetic samples