In their discussion paper, The Road to Long Finance: A Systems View of the Credit Scrunch, Michael Mainelli and Bob Giffords have laid out a provocative analysis of the global financial crisis in an attempt to widen the debate. The authors have worked hard to raise some new arguments, dismiss some old ones and change the priorities for others.They point out the dangers of an over-zealous regulatory reaction and of trampling over competition in the name of emergency measures, and they argue that a healthy system must be more diverse. Their key point is the importance of competition in open markets to prevent "too big to fail is too big to regulate", and they encourage more radical investigation of Long Finance.