One of the truly amazing things about the current credit crisis is how little of the opinion out there is truly informed. That should be the definition of "panic" - namely, uninformed people making decisions. We all know the old adage, and I paraphrase, "Those that forget the past are destined to repeat it." As I said in my last blog, the good news for the USA and the world is that the people leading us out of this (namely Paulson and Bernanke) know the past extremely well, and have no intention of repeating it on their watch. Of that I am fairly certain.

 Everyone is itching to call this a "crash." As one of my Wall Street contacts in the credit space told me, "If you think the stock market is bad, you should see the credit market." This week might have been the equalizer on that front as trillions more went flying out the window. The media is now out and about looking for people to mark as culprits in all of this, a sort of electronic version of stoning. This past week people made the decision to sell their 401Ks, leading to one the greatest mutual-fund-driven stock sales in history. Pretty fascinating stuff if you think about it. Everywhere you look people are looking at assets and thinking it must be worth less now than last month. I'm tempted to call the breeders I recently bought a Labrador from and bargain them down as well. That lab can't be worth what it was last month; everything has changed, right? Hopefully you are picking up on my sarcasm here. Now it is extremely unfortunate that the Rescue Bill as we now call last week's bailout took so long. Each day that the negotiations dragged on was one less day the credit markets had to begin thawing. So now even Governor Schwarzenegger is saying that due to locked down credit markets, the great state of California needs federal cash to manage its working capital requirements, and some economists are projecting a 4-5% decrease in GDP for 2009. 

The great thing about alarmists is the amount of opportunity they create as they run around sounding the alarm. America is doing business as usual, albeit in some sectors at a reduced pace and thus requiring some reorganization. Some people are hurting for sure. Those with the greatest sensitivities to increases in LIBOR and overall rate increases that can effect consumer buy decisions are definitely having a tough time. Those with the balance sheet to weather this storm will emerge stronger than ever and be part of the growth in the future.

So what can we learn from all of this. My view is that the main take-away is that transparency is good. What got us into this mess in the first place is the creation of financial products that did not provide transparency down to the electron level. By the time the market got into Inverse Floater CMO Traunches, we were in big trouble. The CDS market is a little scary too, quite frankly, although it looks like the CME is going to create the necessary standardization and transparency to make that market more transparent and efficient as well, and in the process should do extremely well.

And then there is what we are doing here at The Receivables Exchange, namely bringing transparency and standardization to the receivables finance market. I am more convinced than ever that as companies can access working and growth capital via a transparent and efficient market, using their most readily available asset, their commercial receivables, that the productivity gains we have seen all over the economy over the last 20 years will finally come to working capital management.

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.