Nine top bankers were questioned by MPs in a special hearing about the credit crisis on Wednesday, but little consensus emerged, according to media reports.

While banks have been the hot topic in The Hague for the past few months and have had billions of euros of taxpayers’ money pumped into them, few lessons appear to have been learned, the says the Volkskrant.
‘[The crisis] is apparently not the fault of the banks, or the supervisors or the shareholders,’ the Volkskrant quotes Alexander Pechtold, leader of the Liberal democratic party D66 as saying. ‘But in the meantime, billions of euros are disappearing out of the window and you [the banks] act as if it just arrived by chance.’
‘I’ve seen 35% of my turnover vanish in six months,’ an irritated Floris Deckers, CEO of Van Lanschot Bankiers, was reported as saying by the Volkskrant. ‘Then you are no longer in the black.’
Not optimistic
Sjoerd van Keulen, of SNS Reaal bank, was not optimistic about the future. ‘As supervisor, the Dutch central bank really has very little insight into what is going on. The direct trade in risky new financial products – away from the stock exchange and the supervisory bodies was ‘dangerous’, he is quoted as saying in the NRC.
‘We should be proud of our dullness,’ Jos Baeten of Fortis Verzekering says in the NRC. ‘We should offer more security.’
The paper also quotes Rabobank’s CEO Bert Heemskerk who attacked the role of the stock exchange: ‘Banks serve the public good and should be in the hands of stable shareholders. They should not be listed.
‘ING’s current share price is total nonsense. I think creating shareholder value is bull-shit.’