Why doesn't everyone in the UK not buy houses so that wealthy foreign and Sovereign investors can snap up property in our country for cheap with their petrodollars? And we pay for those petrodollars, so that sounds like a great deal!

Michael, London,

Building on Ian's idea, why not pay advisers selling financial products as follows?

1. Industry average salary.

2. Bonus element of say 25% of total available bonus for hitting target - just so the managers have something to manage!

3. remaining 75% bonus in the product being sold, and with the bonus payment delayed to fall in line with the investment cycle of the product, so if it's a 5 year investment note, pay out when the 5 years have passed, proportional to the final value of the investment.

That way if it is a duff or risky investment the advisr shares the investors pain. Also the commission need not come off the initial investment, and the quality of the investment will pay for it, not the individual investor who bought the product.

And advisers would be less inclined to hop from employer to employer leaving a trail of disaster in their wake.

Sounds just oo fair to ever happen, somehow! It only takes one company to try it though...

Andy , Bath,

any committee made up of m.p's will always want to shut the door after the horse has well and truly bolted. the F.B.I. warned the american mortgage system was the next mafia years ago.
noone in the media explained the extent that our financial institutions were involved both with subprime investments and similar lending practices.
did any m.p. know that some mortgage lenders were lending upto 125% of valuation.?
noone knows the extent of debts in this country.
i think their may be more trouble ahead than our betters are telling us that is if they know which is doubtful!
the incompetence is breathtaking.
m.p.s are too busy counting their airmiles to make sense of the countries finances

rod smith, manchester, england

What is the point of hyperbole like

Mr McFall says that the “best and brightest at our top investment banks have expended great energy designing ludicrously complex financial instruments, which you need a Nobel Prize in physics to understand”.

It just makes McFall look like a financial ignoramus. The products may be complex but so is a car.

bob, London,

Investment banks the world over have set out to hire the 'best and brightest' with the explicit intention of ramping up headline annual profits in order that they can pay themselves seven figure salaries and bonuses. Governments constantly reassure admiringly that ' It's good for the economy'; regulators and central bankers come along ex post facto and the mug taxpayers, pension fund managers and investors pick up the bill.
Awaiting the next array of innovative financial products of Nobel Prize complexity to reward the few and sting the many....

R.M., London, England

The FSA should be abolished immediately. It has proved itself to be totally incompetent again and again. It merely creates a false sense of security. It is so incompetent that even when they are warned by bankers themselves, they fail to act. They also have this complaint commissiner of theirs which just rubber stams all their inactivity. If they were any good, London bankers would not go to jail in other countries for their activities in London.

Sinan, London,

With regard to investors using current UK mortgage offers to buy houses, I quote from the article: "Mr McFall accuses investors of engaging in a “bout of collective madness”. “Unfortunately, you cannot regulate against stupidity,” he says."

Right, next time I'll 'regulate my stupidity' and invest in a nice warm cardboard box instead of a house.

Great.

Nick, London,

Why on earth should the government warn the banks about the riskiness of investments? Surely banks by their nature are meant to be the ones to assess risk. The problem was rather the incentive structure. The banks that securitised subprime mortgages and claimed that they were thereby rendered prime investments were doing so because it was profitable for them to do so. There needs to be some way in which bonuses based upon sand have to be repaid. Otherwise there is alway going to be a one way bet. Perhaps one solution would be to pay bonuses in tied stock.

Ian, Frederick, USA/MD