From Prof William Martello.

Sir, Clark McGinn (Letters, October 30) equates regulators to bad doctors who ignored their financial patients. This certainly does not reflect the US experience. Instead, government under both President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush systematically dismantled and diminished the authority of regulators over financial markets, leaving instead a "free market" where unbridled activity could reign. Thus the blame for the economic consequences suffered does indeed belong to those financial actors involved, and not to the regulators whose oversight had been removed.