GM should be allowed to fail

In the 1970s the European car industry went through a very painful process of modernisation, automation and quality control - the US decided not to face the music but to subsidise their industry instead - giving tax breaks for buying gas guzzlers.

The result is a lazy industry producing a product that won't sell outside the US

For years a large part of the US car industry has only been kept afloat from the profit of selling credit on the new cars - cars made at a loss - now the credit has dried up, so has the profit and sales.

Making poor quality cars at a loss to sell credit is not a good business model and they need to face up to it.

Interest rates went too high

It may not have stopped the crisis arising, but one thing is pretty clear now, and was clear to me at the time, interest rates should never have gone as high as they did in late 2008

Chasing short term inflation as your one and only gaol for setting interest rates is not smart enough.

Last year inflation was rising due to ridiculous speculation on the price of oil (and pretty much no other reason). This was bound to burn itself out (pardon the pun). So its hard to see how making money itself more expensive was going to bring down inflation. Base rates had little, is any, baring on the oil price speculation.

However, at the same time the first seeds of the current crisis were clearly visible, yet the BoE was still raising interest rates - all that seems to have achieve is giving them more room (but not enough) to cut rates since.

Nobody saw this coming !?!?!!?

Of all the things said about the current financial crisis the least credible seems to be "we never saw it coming".

My father's a vicar, and by no means a financial wiz, and even he saw it coming - for property prices to be sustainable, the average man has to be able to afford the average house - this should be a pretty simple calculation - mortgage = 3 * income - as soon as this started getting stretched to 3.5, 4 or even 4.5 times it should have been obvious.

But even without applying a formula, just the number of TV programs telling us how unaffordable housing was becoming should have given the game away.

We should have let the banks fall

The current banking crisis seems to me being caused by the fact the banks just don't know which bank they can trust and which they can't. This seems to be caused by the fact that they all know they all have toxic debt, but nobody know who carries what toxins and in what quantity.

However, if instead of being bailed out they had simply been allowed to go into liquidation, they would then been cleaned up and the clean bits re-floated - if this had been done it might have caused more pain in the short term, but seems to me we'd be in a better situation than as are now.

But then I know nothing about the complexities of international banking - and ignorance is bliss. Of course, half the problem seems to be nobody else seemed to have a grasp on the complexities either.

Welcome

Warning: I'm likely to be opinionated - but opinion sparks debate and from that we all learn.