September 10, 2008

But then where were the world’s most influential economists?

Sir Martin Wolf asks of the US government to “spare us homilies on the sacred role of free financial markets for a long time” and with sarcasm refers to financial geniuses that transmuted simple assets into assets so non-transparent that the market ultimately imploded”, “America’s housing solution is not a good one to follow” September 10.

It leaves me asking where were all the “world’s most influential economists” when they were needed to alert that allowing the financial regulators to impose the credit rating agencies on the markets so much made them far from free and was plain crazy since “Everyone knows that, sooner or later, the ratings issued by the credit agencies are just a new breed of systemic errors, about to be propagated at modern speeds”? The last quote is from a letter published in FT on May 11, 2003 and written by someone unfortunately not sufficiently influential, namely me.