I read with interest Jorge Heine's article of December 21 and would like to raise a couple of points in response.

Heine entirely ignores what is probably the most important trend in the past 200 years. This is the direct "peer-to-peer" connection and accelerated in recent times by the pervasive spread of the Internet and related communications.

This connection is already making conventional transaction-based business models obsolete and leading to a move to service provision instead.

The music industry - in which Jamaica is a fine participant - was where this process began.

Where music leads, so will finance follow, particularly in nations without the barriers to entry of First World nations, and huge legacy investment in obsolete inrastructure and businesss. In Kenya, for instance, we currently see mobile payment subscribers being added at a rate of 15,000 per week.

Jamaica is well placed - with a little lateral thinking - to leap past the moribund global financial system to new, networked and 'peer-to-peer' forms of credit and investment using legal frameworks which are neither public, state nor corporate, but a new alternative based upon partnership law.

My advice to Jamaica is: do some lateral thinking and ignore conventional solutions.

I am, etc.,

CHRIS COOK

cojock@hotmail.com

Linlithgow