Madam, - Bravo to Senator Shane Ross for calling for the resignation the CEO of the Financial Regulator.
The regulator's ineffectiveness is astonishing. If it were an ostrich nothing would show above ground.
As for the bankers themselves, I suppose there is no possibility of them accepting responsibility or accountability as their brethren have done in the UK. Integrity is not a concept that clouds the greedy horizons of the Irish banking Sector. - Yours, etc,
RICHARD HOLLINSHEAD, Hazelhatch Park, Celbridge, Co Kildare.
Madam,- With the half-hearted appeasement measures now in place to shore up the rotting financial system, global policy-makers from Washington to Berlin have shown themselves to be weak-minded, spineless and myopic. This should come as no surprise, since it was the same people whose lack of foresight got us into this mess in the first place.
The partial nationalisation of banks now under way will neither give governments the necessary leverage to truly "fix" the banking sector, nor will it allow markets the opportunity to purge themselves of the sickness created by poisoned financial instruments.
Instead, it will perpetuate the cycle of reckless speculation, while punishing the real economy and the taxpayer for the indiscretions of the rich.
Financial institutions must be allowed to fail. Banks must be let go bust, and those who let greed guide them into making investments they did not fully understand should have to pay the price. This is the only way to ensure these mistakes are not made again.
Re-regulation is not the answer to anything. Regulation, in any form that distorts the price of risk (loan guarantees, deposit guarantees, mandated lending criteria), will just stifle markets.
What is needed instead is transparency. Banks must be forced to bare their balance sheets to all stakeholders - in other words, publish everything on their websites, for all to see. Then the market could tell who is carrying the bad loans long before those loans get to be so big they threaten the system.
If that, and only that, had been insisted upon by financial authorities even five years ago, we would not have seen this financial crisis happen.
The proper role of those in the financial sector - supporting the real economy - is well understood. But for years, they have taken much too much cream off the milk for what they give us, using opacity to weave an ever more tangled web of financial gimmickry, which we then had to pay them to decipher.
Now that they've been caught in their own web, we have an opportunity to reconstruct financial capitalism so that it fulfils its functions of money creation and risk pricing in a transparent and cost-effective way. - Yours, etc,
GRAHAM STULL, Brussels, Belgium.
Madam, - In August 2006 the International Monetary Fund published a report entitled "Ireland: Financial System Stability Assessment Update", revealing that the banks' total provision for loan losses as a percentage of total loans more than halved between 2001 and 2006 while annual credit growth rates almost doubled.
The report drew attention to the concentration of property debt as a likely major problem in the event of a credit contraction. It recommended that the Central Bank update its stress-testing methodology. In the sweetest of ironies, the report is available on the Financial Regulator's website. - Yours, etc,
JOHN HARPUR, Trim, Co Meath.