Finance minister Wouter Bos wants bankers to say sorry for the financial mess facing the country, reports the Financieele Dagblad on Tuesday.

The comments were made during the minister’s guest lecture at Erasmus University in Rotterdam on Monday night.
‘Ultimately, the financial crisis is a moral crisis,’ the paper reports Bos as saying.
Calls from his audience for a clampdown on bankers’ bonuses were not the answer, Bos said. The problems in the Netherlands are ‘not connected with bonuses in London or on Wall Street’.
It is, the paper quoted him as saying, a question of trust. ‘For public trust in the financial sector, it is of great importance that bankers say sorry very loudly,’ Bos is quoted as saying.
Bankers at a British parliamentary hearing last week were more apologetic than their counterparts at a similar hearing in the Netherlands, says Bos.
‘Of course I know that there was a PR motive behind bankers’ apologies in England. And I accept that, as long as they partly mean what they say.’