June 08, 2010

The odious and arbitrary regulatory discrimination of risks must stop… now!

Sir Jeffrey Sachs in “It is time to plan for the post-Keynesian era” June 8, in his list of proposals, ignores the fundamental change that must occur in our financial regulations.

It just cannot be that our regulators allow banks to lend to fancy AAA rated sovereigns with zero capital requirements, or to sovereigns rated like Greece the last five years with only 1.6 percent of capital, while requiring the banks to hold 8 percent in capital when lending to the small businesses and entrepreneurs.

That odious and arbitrary regulatory discrimination must end now; the coward market discriminates more than enough when pricing for risks; and our financial regulators should immediately be removed as they seem absolutely incapable to understand that there are other risks in life than “the risk of default”.