Lessons to not draw from the `sub prime crisis'

Percy Mistry has an article in Economic Times on the lessons that India's policy makers might draw from the `sub-prime crisis'. Also see Ila Patnaik (Indian Express) and Niranjan Rajadhyaksha (Mint) on the same subject. Do look at The credit crunch quandary by David Hale in Financial Times. I also enjoyed reading Subprime ‘crisis’: observations on the emerging debate by Charles Wyplosz where at the end, he says:

The deeper moral is simple. Financial markets exist to do risky things. The more risk they take, the higher the (expected) returns. You can use regulation to squeeze risk out of a segment of the market, say banks, but you don’t eliminate the risk, you just move it elsewhere. New segments, say hedge funds, emerge to take over the risk and the high (expected) returns that go with it. The problem is that little is known of the new segment and its players, so the armies of regulators and supervisors that protect us look in the wrong direction because they don’t know where to look. There has been much talk about regulating the hedge funds; it might happen, so the game will move elsewhere. The only way to eliminate financial crises is to fully eliminate risk. Kim Jung Il knows how; eliminate financial institutions. But that means no (expected) returns.

I would say it only slightly differently.