The current financial crisis is not the fault of banks but is a good thing because it will be a good spring clean of the economy, Rabobank CEO Bert Heemskerk says in Friday’s Trouw.

‘Imagine that GDP goes down 3.5%, as forecast,’ he tells the paper. ‘That means that our wealth per head of the population… will be back at 2006 levels.’
Even without the problems on the US mortgage market where the crisis started, things would have gone wrong sooner or later, Heemskerk says. The building fury in Dubai was also a risk factor. ‘The bubble would have burst somehow.’
But Heemskerk does not accept that bankers are to blame, even though he acknowledges that there are tens of thousand of billions of euros too much in circulation and that risky investments have been sold to pension funds and local councils.
‘But the crisis is due to a failure of supervision, wrong laws, bonuses and greed,’ he tells the paper.