A recent article in the New York Times has provoked some heated discussion as to the level of culpability banks and credit reference agencies share for the credit crash after it was revealed that they mined and marketed data and targeted sub-prime borrowers. Billions of mail solicitations for mortgages and refinancing, personal loans and credit cards were deluged on Americans. Countless calls offering easy credit, more credit, it's ok we know you are bankrupt credit rang out across the USA. It's the sheer extent of it that is alarming.

Data on every aspect of consumers was filtered and studied to tailor compelling messages to the recipient.

Did people naturally assume that with the real estate industry shouting about endlessly rising home values, banks 'telling' consumers they were a good risk, they must be otherwise why would so many banks offer to lend them money and why else would they receive daily credit card offers?

Banks don't lend to people unless they think they can pay it back do they? My credit rating must be good. Recent bankrupts and those who had just suffered foreclosure were specifically targeted.

The enabler for this orgy of credit was freely available mountains of private, shopping, spending, earning, health and every minutiae of data, mined by experts in order to achieve maximum returns(in the short term).

The complete loss of privacy and rampant sharing of credit details with any marketer with the money to pay may well have contributed to the collapse of our financial markets.

Privacy is certainly likely to get more punch in the near future, and we may see even the generally tighter Eu privacy laws being given a little more tightening. All that information freely available to anyone with a motive to pay has come home to roost and contributed to a collapsed world financial market and potential loss of identity and increased fraud on Main st and the Internet.

In going forward we might learn a few lessons.

The response from readers in the NY Times to the article Banks Mine Data and Woo Troubled Borrowers could provide bankers with an interesting take on the general tone out there and might disuade any European operators from following that path too closely.