Description: With the possible exception of full faith and credit debts of the United States, every loan carries some risk with it regardless of the borrower, and this risk varies depending on the creditworthiness of the person or institution that is supposed to repay the debt. Bearing that risk requires some sort of capital, both as a legal requirement and as evidence of good sense in lending, but recently we seem to have forgotten the basic relationship between a loan and the capital associated with it. The lesson of the current debacle is, or certainly ought to be, that the risk inherent in a financial transaction cannot be made to go away by the mere act of repackaging that transaction and renaming it.