Will the United States and China ever be the wiser?

I was reading an interesting commentary in the Philippine Star today about the bail-out plan in the United States and the continuing fall-out from the Chinese melamine scare. Here's an excerpt from the article written by Rey Gamboa:

About the USD700 billion rescue plan:
If there’s one lesson learned out of this fiasco, it’s that when it comes to money, people and their greed can’t be left to their own devices, and that the more sophisticated the financial products are, the more they should be regulated.

The demise of structured products like the collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps and credit linked notes almost pushes us back to the era of plain vanilla banking or the basic deposit taking and lending; more importantly, though, expect more stringent measures to be in place.

Most likely too, for a long while, we won’t be seeing the careless, subprime lending that banks in the US engaged in when markets were wallowing in liquidity. It’s back to rigid credit investigations for every borrower, when barely a year-and-a-half ago, US banks were approving home loans to every Tom, Dick and Harry.

About China's melamine scare:
China’s eagerness to become the world’s next economic heavyweight is also taking a toll from its laxity of quality control regulations. Battling the melamine-in-milk scourge, China now shares top spot in notoriety with the Wall Street meltdown. This, just months after the big recall of Made-in-China toys that cost Chinese exporters quite a pretty sum in losses.

There is now pressure on China to tighten its regulatory controls, which ultimately means higher cost end-products at a time when world trade is slowing down and other equally eager emerging economies are ready to wage price wars of manufactured products.

Capping the string of unfortunate scandals that increasingly is weakening its already precarious state of export prospects, China is also coming to grips with the fact that a number of its banks have substantial exposure to the toxic US home loans. Triple jeopardy indeed.