November 28, 2008

Dear World, you’ve got to be kidding!

Sir I refer to Philip Stephens “Broken banks put the state back in the driving seat” November 28 and which as a basic premise must have it that our governments were not in the driving seat. Wrong!

Our financial regulators thought themselves capable of living out their bedroom fantasies of a world with no bank crisis and thereto in Basel imposed some minimum capital requirements on the banks based on the regulator’s particular monsters, defaults, and officially empowered the credit rating agencies as the risk watchers for the world.

As a direct result we now find ourselves in the midst of a financial meltdown product of having been pointed towards the supposedly risk free swamplands where the lousily awarded mortgages to the subprime sector made their living.

And now we want to dig us further in the hole giving some government bureaucrats even more room to exercise their fantasies… Dear World, you’ve got to be kidding!