Lest we continue to be buried by headlines, hype, fear-mongerers and prophets of doom, a couple of things need to be said about the so-called financial markets of the last couple of weeks.
If you stopped frothing at the mouth for a minute it would be valid to argue that all the stock market has done is correct the irrational bubble increases of the last few years.
And while we seem to hyperventilate about the All Ordinaries Index falling to just under 4,000, as recently as 2003 the All Ordinaries Index averaged under 3,000.
So even taking the catastrophe on Friday, the All Ordinaries Index is still 33 per cent higher than it was in 2003, and it's still 100 per cent higher than when the Howard Government was elected in 1996.
The issue for leadership is to understand simply that the current US banking regulations and, dare I say it, loan regulations here and the issue of credit cards here, lack proper supervision.
What led to people in America being given money they couldn't afford and banks running up phenomenal debt is the whole notion of deregulation gone mad. And its corollary, the lack of regulation.
If kids have no rules in the classroom, mayhem follows.
No rules for the so-called hotshots of Wall Street and look where we finished up.
Leaving the market to fix all this is not the answer.
And to talk in language of universal destruction, like banking tsunamis and toxic debts, is to ignore that we're an entirely different economy from that of the Great Depression, or even up until the 1980s.
As Fariborz Moshirian, the Professor of Finance at the Australian School of Business wrote recently, "We now have Chian and India which are generating significant global demand.
"And despite the current global financial crisis they will still have strong economic growth."
And Japanese banks have become a major source of funds for some of the troubled banks in the United States.
But this is a crisis in leadership. And we still haven't heard what mechanism is going to address the underlying problems.
As Professor Moshirian wrote recently, "The head of the IMF Dominique Strauss-Khan said last week 'It's because there were no regulations or controls or not enough regulations or controls that this situation was born... we must draw conclusions from what has happened, that is to say regulate, with great precision, financial institutions and markets.'"
Now put simply that means there has to be better supervision of the operation of central banks, which I might add includes our Reserve Bank.
There have to be rules and regulations for financial products that are on the market, and that includes credit cards. And then banks and non-banks have got to be accountable to regulators.
It's time we forgot the doom-mongering and got on with addressing what caused the problem.
If the chairs are broken in the classroom and there's graffiti all over the walls, and muck has been thrown at the blackboard, it's most probably the result of very bad supervision and an absence of proper discipline.
The world of finance is no different.
Let's now hear what our so-called leaders are going to do about all this.
