I don’t believe it is a question of knowledge or experience but simply to ask the right questions. I’m sure you use an electronic calculator on occasion to add or subtract numbers out of laziness. You are comfortable with this because you can always verify the result in your head.

However, can a younger adult do this? I suspect not, instead they rely entirely on what the calculator tells them or in other words they rely upon technology, its magic really because the individual does not need to have any basic maths skills at all.

It’s the same scenario behind the math that underpinned the real estate markets. A young Horatio Boedihardjo linked below explains this in an excellent article. Lucid though he is he too misses the fundamental reason why it all failed.

The math, which is still sound, relied upon the track record of giving ‘good’ credit over the long term. However, the market for such credit had flattened off leaving lack lustre growth and earnings prospects.

The problem was how to produce growth in a saturated market. On an imperceptibly small scale some started to sell products to ‘bad’ risk individuals. Nothing bad happened at first because of the inertia in the system but it did produce profits for those doing it. The rest is history.

The challenge for regulators now is to ensure that we return to ‘good’ credit risk management when a culture of ‘bad’ credit risk management is endemic internationally. The down side is that we return to flat or slower growth.

Property or assets are underpinning national currencies via GDP and there is no will or mechanisms to manage it. For me the political challenge is to somehow reduce costs at an individual level by whatever means in order to make us competitive as a nation, to stop gilding the lily so to speak. The problem is will ‘the children of plenty’ understand the need to do this or even allow it to happen?

Ref: Horatio Boedihardjo: How Maths Killed Lehman Brothers
http://plus.maths.org/issue51/features/boedihardjo/index.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/04/financial-stability-board-g20

The FSB is also run from Basel, unlike the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision it does have teeth and is already up and running. Do we need further ?

There are however doubts about possible collusion and information sharing within the FSB.
http://www.webofdebt.com/articles/big_brother_basel.php

Yet to be philosophical, if the EU took no action in terms of the current situation insofar as future preventative measures are concerned, we would surely condemn it.

The question is whether we can produce a sufficiently flexible solution to accommodate nimble but appropriate change when market conditions call for it, or, conversely, achieve global harmony so that everyone is effectively hampered by bureaucracy which is, at least, equal.

I have to say that both outcomes seem to me unlikely.

But if we have to ride with the European herd, as it were, we had best be galloping up there at the head rather than our usual approach of one foot in the stirrup and the other on the ground.

No man is an island, and this island isn’t a continent, even if it did once theoretically control some two-fifths (was it?) of the earth’s surface.

Legislating these standards, which are voluntarily being taken up will serve no purpose except to create more EU posts. As a note most working class already consider as possibly corrupt many positions in the EU.