More than bank lending it is the willingness to take risks that must be restored.

Sir holy Moses, Martin Wolf in “How Britain flirts with disaster” November 28 tells us that the global freeze that hit Iceland is on its way to Britain as the economy will shrink, the public debt increase and the ratio of it all snowball into pure unsustainability. I am no Britain expert but it would seem that Wolf has trusted the triple-As contained in previous pre-Budget reports too much. Now he might know how it feels for a banker that deposited too much trust in the credit rating agencies.

Wolf ends his article saying “Letting bank lending stay frozen is not an option. The government surely knows that. Do the bankers?” meaning by that we better start rowing all or will sink like a stone. Wolf is only partially right.

It is not so much the bank-lending per se that has to be restored, what is much more needed is the willingness of the market to take risks. In this respect, and for the umpteenth time, I submit that it is much wiser asking the governments to eliminate the risk-adverseness they introduced in the market, foremost with the minimum capital requirements for the banks designed by the Basel Committee, than to have some bureaucrats becoming the risk-takers playing with the future tax-payer’s money.