Barack Obama is looking in the wrong direction

Sir, Barack Obama in “Fine unscrupulous mortgage lenders” August 29, believes that “the implosion of the subprime lending industry . . . all started with a good idea – helping people buy homes who previously could not affor to”. He is seriously mistaken.

What catapulted some lousy awarded mortgages (forget about calling them subprime, they are much worse than that) into a global financial problem was that some credit rating agencies have been too much empowered by the banking regulators to do their oversight.

If we do not fix that, then next time around our problem might not be with mortgages but with something even much worse.