As is often said, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.

For that reason we take great interest in Finance Minister Dr Nigel Clarke’s announcement of plans to finally publish all information relative to the unfinished Finsac Commission report.

For the very young it’s probably very difficult to get a grip on Jamaica’s financial sector collapse of the 1990s.

To put it very mildly, that event was, as Dr Clarke describes it, “a defining period of the Jamaican story”.

It was a time when a number of thriving Jamaican-owned banks, near banks, insurance companies, and numerous businesses, including exporters, collapsed under the weight of astronomically high interest rates and soaring debt.

Many well-off Jamaicans were wiped out, losing their businesses, and in some cases their homes, which had been mortgaged as risk-taking entrepreneurs pushed to stay afloat.

The People’s National Party (PNP) Government of the day came under strong and sustained attack not just from the then Opposition Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) but from business leaders for what was described as inept policy direction.

Dr Clarke told Parliament and the nation on Tuesday that the financial crisis led to “a rapid build-up in our debt ratio” and “had the effect of obliterating opportunity as… interest costs consumed national resources”.

Finsac (Financial Sector Adjustment Company) Limited was established by the Government in January 1997 to restore stability for under-threat financial houses and enterprises.

Critics say that, instead of bringing stability, Finsac’s efforts led in large measure to wipeout and “fire sale” to overseas investors.

We hear that the entire episode cost the Jamaican economy approximately $120 billion or about 40 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP).

In his presentation on Tuesday, Dr Clarke said that by comparison the global financial crisis of 2009 cost the US nine per cent of GDP.

Fifteen years ago, the Bruce Golding-led JLP Government appointed a commission of enquiry into what caused Jamaica’s financial crash of the 1990s and the surrounding circumstances.

It’s an extraordinary thing that the expected report from the appointed commissioners kept missing deadlines and was never completed despite considerable financial outlay by Government.

Dr Clarke tells us that material to be released in due course “consists of contributions from then government officials, economists, academics, former leaders of failed financial institutions, customers of those institutions including those who found themselves with ballooning debts, among many other stakeholders…”

We agree that “we owe it to the victims of that era, to ourselves, and to future generations, to… record for posterity the evidence gathered” and to make it public.

The pain lives on for many and we suspect a systematic exploration of the financial collapse could provide cathartic release for many.

As business leader Dr Oliver Jones said in his foreword to a painful book Too Black to Succeed – the Finsac Experience written by a victim Mrs Valerie Dixon: “…the Finsac experience is not a nightmare from which one will wake up. Indeed there are real victims who hurt and, in some cases, are maimed for life”.

Beyond that, Jamaicans need to get a better understanding of what really happened so that the errors, whatever they were, made by whomever, are never repeated.