That they did not know it does not mean they should not have known it!

Sir John Kay in “Banks got burned by their own ‘innocent fraud’”, October 14 writes: “Is the deception of others more or less venal when one has also deceived oneself? That question must be left for moral philosophers – and historians of our era – to answer”.

Absolutely not! We cannot afford to leave this question to moral philosophers or historians.

The question that John Kay poses paints out the possibility that the guilty party is innocent because it “has also deceived” itself and this, in this case at least, is unacceptable. The Financial Regulators should have known that creating a system that empowered so much so few with providing information to the market as the regulators did with the credit rating agencies was bound to lead to a crisis like the one we are having.

The Financial Regulators might argue that “they did not know it”, but that only puts the burden squarely back on us to place the regulation of the financial sector in the hands of persons capable of knowing such fundamentally simple things of life and financial markets.

Indeed how will this risk-based priced consumer generation respond?

Sir Aline van Duyn is exploring vital terrain in “Hard-pressed consumers refuse to read from script” August 18 analyzing how this generation of “risk-based priced” consumers will respond.

Just for a starter there must be a world of difference between having you credit worthiness assessed in an eye to eye conversation by a lending officer and today’s having a computer read you number. At least it must be affecting the moral implications in the “to pay or not to pay”.

I suspect we will also see a growing reluctance from the high interest rate payers to remain in that group since if they can service their debt adequately at those rates they might feel they are de-facto meriting lower rates.

Risk based pricing, which is similar to placing persons that after some doubtful genetic test are presumed to be especially exposed to an illness in a separate insurance pool, could be causing much of the growing social inequality that is currently attributed by some to globalization. Risk profiling, for a discriminatory purpose, is prohibited in most spheres of our social relations, except in lending where it is very much cheered, by most.