Caught between moral hazards and moral duties

Sir, Lawrence Summers rightly ask us to “Beware the moral hazard fundamentalist”, September 24, but ends up sounding a bit fundamentalist himself listing the three conditions that if all met makes “a strong case for public action”, namely that there are contagion risks; that it is a liquidity and not a solvency problem; and that it will not cost the taxpayer any money. Very helpful indeed! Under those conditions the moral hazard of not intervening would seem to loom large.

But what if for example the problems were derived from the fact that the regulator through the use of minimum capital requirement rules had ordered or, somewhat softer, induced the financial institutions to dismantle or, somewhat softer, to scale down their own credit risk departments and follow more the criteria of the credit rating agencies, would the authorities in that case not also have a moral duty to help out?