Dr Gordon Brown and his G20 colleagues have made the wrong diagnoses about the financial crisis and will end up prescribing the wrong cures that will probably make the patient even worse. That's according to the leading financial analyst Miles Saltiel in a new Briefing paper for the Adam Smith Institute.
In the paper, What Went Wrong? An Agenda for the G20, Saltiel identifies a number of the wrong diagnoses. Among them are the arguments that China's saving and America's spending made trade balances unsustainable; that financial derivatives had become unfathomably complicated; that bank deregulation is to blame; and that excessive bonuses promoted excessive risk. These and other false explanations he dismisses with concise rebuttals.
Much more probable explanations, he concludes, were the US and UK's loose monetary policy and their hubristic social engineering that forced banks to make bad mortgage deal. And the fact that regulation had created banks 'too big to fail' – not helped by the inept Basel protocols. These, and other explanations, are what the G20 should be concentrating on. But they probably won't.
To read What Went Wrong? click here
