It’s the lefty French who are best placed to sustain their albeit snail-paced growth (no offence) precisely because of their stranglehold on credit and LTV’s and earnings multiples.

“a revered figure – affectionately nicknamed “the Oracle”- proclaimed that risks could be handled by the markets themselves.”

Own up, Mike R, we know who you are now, and what you did!

It was people like Soros we should have listened to – never risked his arm in his life simply because he didn’t need to, as there were enough naive ideologists refusing to accept reality.

A market making money out of trading risk entities, that works as long as there are enough mugs out there to buy the rubbish.

It has the best record of any official organisation in anticipating the credit crisis, but its warnings went unheeded.

Dr Bill White, the BIS’s outgoing chief economist, has warned for several years of a looming crisis. A year ago he said the world’s economies were facing their greatest challenges since the Great Depression. “The fundamental cause of today’s emerging problems was excessive and imprudent credit growth over a long period,” he said.

So how about the politicians just shut up for a while & start listening .

The government of the time thought it had to raise the standards of the banking sector to the highest level. And it is.

It was a socialist government.

Yes that is a view being aired in counterpoint to the Brown/EU proposal for IMF or some such to give global “early warnings” & oversight.

I suppose one must get used to Brown’s disembling ability to ignore his past actions.IMF gave UK seven “early warnings” between Dec 2003 & April 2008-on it’s State & Private debt levels, & it’s property price bubble .

Brown ignored them all.If he had paid more attention to IMF then than he is doing now, maybe we wouldn’t have been in so much of a mess.

In USA when Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac become a key enabler of the mortgage crisis by fueling Wall Street’s efforts to securitize subprime loans.They became the primary customer of all AAA-rated subprime-mortgage pools. In addition, they held an enormous portfolio of mortgages themselves.

They were the US mortgage market.

Greenspan warned in 2005 that “If Fannie and Freddie “continue to grow, continue to have the low capital that they have, continue to engage in the dynamic hedging of their portfolios, which they need to do for interest rate risk aversion, they potentially create ever-growing potential systemic risk down the road,” he said. “We are placing the total financial system of the future at a substantial risk.”

The resulting Bill would have given a regulator power to crack down, and would have required the companies to eliminate their investments in risky assets.

It didn’t get passed & the rest as they say is history.

Yes we need more transparency, accountability & less irresonsibility.

Yes we need more cross border co-operation.

But we also need a good deal less international grandstanding by the very politicians who, having ignored early warnings before the crash ,now say we need more of it.

As for the EU-instead of jetting off to the USA & pontificating about a new world financial order, Sarkozy & Barroso should nip down to Madrid.

Spanish banks have not been bailed out-their central bank has only had to deal with the liquidity problem- reason – Spain’s tough regulations on banks that forbid them to invest in the subprime market and forces them to put aside a provision for every loan they grant.

Spanish regulators have imposed tight rules in Spain’s banking sector, for instance forbiding companies from having off-balance-sheet investment vehicles that other banks in the euro zone, Britain and the United States have used to hide their toxic assets.