A leading banking lawyer once described our bankers as primary school children playing football. If one of those children had a fall, the general reaction of the other children would be to laugh and sometimes even clap at the kid instead of running to help. And so it is with our bankers.

After lending to prospective businessmen, house buyers, etc, the first reaction to a default seems to be to slam them with multiple, repeated doses of legal letters until they pay up or are bankrupted. The proverbial umbrella quickly disappears.

However today, the situation for the borrower becomes even more ominous if the combination of immature bankers and half-baked credit referencing agencies simultaneously come to bear on the borrower.

If the hallmark of the development of a country's economy is its peoples' entrepreneurial spirit, then this spirit must surely have been blunted this last 19 years or so, no thanks to the improper introduction, monitoring, skewed and somewhat illegal implementation of credit referencing on the country's populace.

A country cannot have its Walt Disney, Howard Hughes, Mittal, Walton, Richard Branson, or even Vincent Tan or Robert Kuok without each and everyone of them having had the misfortune to fall first. But falling is not a crime. But failing to get-up to pursue that goal is inexcusable. A 'cendol' seller generally sells 'cendol' at his stall before he is brave enough to open his 'mamak' restaurant.

But in Malaysia, this 'cendol' seller doesn't borrow from a bank to enlarge his business but instead turns to an Ah Long for he (the 'cendol' seller) is considered a poor risk by our benevolent bankers.

If this goes on, the message being told is - don't be enterprising, for if you fail you will be Ctos-ed, CCRIS-ed, meaning you don't get a second chance. In effect, if you stumble, you stay down because the system has your name engraved in lead in its report books which lasts an eternity.

Similarly, the government's efforts to have more of the races to enter the business arena will be negated because they will in all likelihood have the misfortune to fall more often due to their inexperience then others who have greater experience. Is this what we want?

The spirit to compete will disappear and so will the tiger from whatever is left of our economy. Success by definition doesn't exist without failure. With our current bankers, will credit referencing work?

In 1997, when the economic free fall took effect, the banks were the first ones to be hit. A clearly annoyed Daim Zainuddin mumbled that this would be the last time he would be bailing out banks. The irony is that if tomorrow another 1997 hits Malaysia, half of our companies may be insolvent.

If a tsunami hits the west coast, all property from Kuala Kedah to JB may be wiped out. And if there is a nuclear fall out in Pahang, all crops from Kuantan to Segamat may be destroyed. Are our bankers saying that all these people who will now default and be badly credit referenced will now not be able to rebuild their lives all because a bank clerk has picked up their names as 'Ctos-ed' in their system? Silly but real.

What happened to common sense? A little knowledge can be dangerous. If you want this country to be the economic bulwark it ought to be, then the Finance Ministry must come down on these bankers hard and fast. You need lessons? Then go meet up with Mohamed Yunus, last years Nobel Prize Winner for peace.

If banks want to be conservative and truly believe that they are guardians of the public's money, then don't call yourself a bank. You are nothing more then a deposit-taking fund manager and you should rightly conduct yourself as such and dish out the 3% interest rates to all your customers who don't want you to take any risks at all.

However if you are a risk taking bank, then do it right and please hand out the 20% interest earned that depositors deserve if ventures entered into have succeeded.

The Chinese gamble their hard-earned savings on their most auspicious day of the Chinese New Year. They lose on quite a few occasions but it teaches them that there are no guarantees in life and if you lose, you just need to pick yourself up and move on even if it means changing your name and moving to another town. Our bankers and Ctos have ensured today that no one gets a second chance.

Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister's Department M Kayveas did well by highlighting something Malaysians in general were too shy to talk about. He now needs to focus his efforts on our recalcitrant financial institutions.