March 18, 2008

What we need is trusting doubters

Sir Gillian Tett in “A lack of trust spells crisis in every financial language” March 18 should also remember that usually an excess of trust equally spells the origin of a crisis in any language. Tett spells out in no ambiguous terms that “the key to resolving this crisis will not lie with just the injection of billion more of central bank dollars; instead what is needed is restoration of credit” which is exactly trust.

That said and as true as it is, this time around let us please make certain that what we build is some reasonably doubting trust and not that type of blind trust that could only come out of such a preposterous idea that you could leave the issue of managing risks with some minimum capital regulations for the banks based solely on one risk type, namely default, and measured over a fairly short time horizon by some humanly fallible credit rating agencies.