Uncomfortably some answers are only ours to give.

Sir as a radical of the middle or an extremist of the centre I much agree with Martin Wolf in that “Keynes offers us the best way to think about the crisis” December 24. Having said that and not feeling I should be considered a “liquidationist” I yet believe that a tremendous amount of debris has to be cleared out from the system and that also some extensive tilting of the land is required before we expose our economies to any stimulus Tsunami. Can we bailout the past and still sow the seeds for the future is one of those hard questions that needs to be answered in that “spirit of humility and pragmatism” that Martin Wolf asks for.

On the first page of this same FT on Christmas in Iceland we read “There will be a lot of people who leave this country, just go away. Think of the future here for the children. When they are 95 they will still be paying for this“. Does Keynes have an answer on what to do about that? Probably not! The uncomfortable truth, and which is why most of us wear blinders, is that some answers are only ours to give.

PS. Since Martin Wolf wishes “to see the punishment of financial alchemist who claimed that ever more debt turns economic leas into gold” let me remind him that the prime ingredient in that alchemist formula was that the triple-A ratings were to be true, like the financial regulators believed they were… and therefore the market believed it too.