Britain, frankly, don’t you think your forefathers would be ashamed of you.

Sir, I refer to Mure Dickie´s “Battle for Britain”, September 18.

As a professional, with an MBA, I left a very good paying job in my homeland Venezuela, and with the financial support of my father in law, spent a whole year with my wife in London, as an intern at Kleinwort and Benson, and studying corporate finance at London Business School, and International Economic at the London School of economics.

Now, why on earth would I do a thing like that? If I had to explain it, besides of course being alone with my wife, and the English music groups of the 60s, it would be because of Winston Churchill, the traditions of English merchant banks, and British stiff upper lips.

And therefore it has been so sad to me to observe over the last decade, how for instance the Financial Times, the paper I then eagerly read and now just read, does not care one iota about the fact that bank regulations, with credit risk based capital requirements, is making Britain into just another run of the mill risk-adverse nation.

Frankly, don’t you think your forefathers would be ashamed of you.

And then, same day, I read John Gapper admonishing “Scotland has to be braver to build strong banks”, and my reaction is… is this a joke? What about Britain recovering some of its own brave banks?

PS. How is it possible that FT finds nothing wrong with banks being able to leverage so much more their equity for what is perceived as absolutely safe than for what is perceived as risky, when those credit risk perceptions have already been cleared for with interest rates (risk premiums) amount of exposure and other terms? If you absolutely must distort with capital requirements, would it not be better to do so with a purpose, like the creation of jobs or the sustainability of mother earth?

PS. FT has been squarely in favor the NO with respect to Scottish independence. Can you imagine what we could have achieved if FT had taken a similar position on allowing some unelected regulators to distort the allocation of bank credit in our economies?

The Financial Times “a better newspaper for the modern age” ignored the financial story of the century.

Sir, I refer to your new look as described in a special FT supplement on September 15.

Mark Twain said, so we are told, that bankers are those who lend you the umbrella when the sun is out, but want it back, immediately, when it looks like it is going to rain.

But for the Basel Committee bank regulators that was not enough, and so they told the bankers, if you lend while the sun is out, meaning to someone perceived credit risk wise as “absolutely safe”, then we will reward you by allowing you to hold much less capital (equity) than if you lend to someone when it rains, meaning some perceived as risky.

And so, if bankers were risk adverse before, they were now castrated… and of course they started to sing in falsetto accumulating extremely large exposures to what was officially perceive as “absolutely safe”, like AAA rated securities backed with mortgages to the subprime mortgage sector in the US, real estate in Spain and “infallible sovereigns” like Greece.

But, as if those regulations were not risk adverse enough, most financial commentators insisted on an excess of testosterone in the financial system, and so no corrections were made, and all those “risky” medium and small businesses, entrepreneurs and start ups, and who are the tough risky risk-takers we need to get going when the going gets tough, were left without having fair access to bank credit.

And about this story, the de-testosterone-mania that has affected and almost conquered the banks in the western world, the Financial Times has kept mum. And not that they were not informed about it. Truly amazing!

PS. Does this all mean that I would be against banks being well capitalized and therefore more risky? Of course not, requiring players to put plenty of their own skin on the line (or something private specifically related :-), increases the need for testosterone, as well as the need to know how to simultaneously control for it.

Let us aim for bankers capable of that reasoned audacity that can help our economies to move forward and avoid that risk aversion which only guarantees we will stall and fall.