Personally, I'm a little tired of living through historic moments in history. I find it hard not to look back on the 1990s,  which after  the Wall in Berlin came down, had little to no historical moments. The Savings and Loan Crisis cost American taxpayers around $160 billion. The drop in the S&P Monday cost Americans around a Trillion, although much of that was pared Tuesday. That said, here we are in a historic moment - The Credit Crisis of 2008. Congress is in chaos, everyone is running around pointing fingers at each other and Henry Paulson would pull out his hair if he could.  So where do we go from here? Well, Congress is going to have to pass something. If they don't, it is hard to even imagine what the World will look like. But even when Congress does act, the credit markets are going to take time to work transparency back into the system. Interbank lending rates have skyrocketed and the cost is being passed to the end user, be that house buyer or business operator. The Fed is pouring billions of dollars into the system hoping to unclog lending arteries and it is just not trickling through, because fundamentally, this all comes down to one thing - trust in your counterparty. Same thing happened on a much smaller level during the Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) debacle. However in that instance Alan Greenspan and Gerry Corrigan, NY Fed President, called up everyone personally on the banking side, and made it pretty clear that they needed to start trusting their counterparties and doing business, or when the gang got back together, those that didn't, wouldn't be in the gang. In this credit crisis, the problem is too big. Wall Street no longer exists as it existed 6 months ago - or two weeks ago for that matter. Great Wall Street brands, Bear, Lehman and Merrill are gone. Great banking brands, WaMu and Wachovia, are also gone. More will go - and worldwide many more. We are in fact living history - unfortunately, in this case.

So what are President Bush, Bernanke, Paulson and much of Congress so worried about? Simply, they are worried about the ripple effects of what is a Wall Street problem infecting and spreading into Main Street. It's already happening. LIBOR is posting historic increases - and increased cost of capital for financial groups means increased cost of capital to businesses, if in fact you can get access to capital, which in turn reduces projects and risk taking by businesses, which in turn reduces GDP growth. In its most basic form, a shock to the system that then ripples out and creates longterm consequences to economic growth. With that said, it is my view that it does not need to be that way. Why should a growing business in Alternative Energy have an increased cost of capital because of a Credit Shock that has absolutely nothing to do with that business? Why should a business pay a cost of capital that is anything but the idiosyncratic cost of capital for that specific business? Why? Because in today's World access to capital is not company specific. It's not even sector or industry specific. In today's World if you are in business, regardless of your specific performance, your sector performance or your industry performance, you are in it with the rest of them -  a rising tide floats all boats, so to speak. But that is not the way it should be. Access to capital should be idiosyncratic; it should be on the company level, always, and regardless of company size. Not only that, but by introducing portfolio theory to the providers of capital and giving them risk diversification, cost of capital should be the lowest that the market can actually bear, it should be efficient, it should be flexible, and it should move only based on how your company performs and the specific risks associated with your business. That is where the world of working capital is going, with future shocks to the system contained and localized.

 Nic Perkin is co-founder and President of The Receivables Exchange. The Exchange is the world's first online marketplace for real-time trading of accounts receivable.