The one and only focus of Basel is risk-adverseness

Sir John Plender in “Let’s not forget to mention liquidity risk at the Basel round” October 10, though having good intentions gets it wrong, when he says that “the focus of banking supervision has become biased towards capital at the expense of liquidity” as he confuses goals with instruments. The one and only focus of the Basel banking regulations has been to drive out the risks from the banks and for which purpose they decided to use the minimum capital requirements instead of what Plender now seems to suggest some Basel ordered minimum liquidity requirements. The sooner we accept the truth that what Basel has managed to do is to have the risks hide out in the undergrounds, such as Special Purpose Vehicles, or in other dimensions, such as sophisticated instruments impossible to value, the better chance we have of coming to grips with reality. We need also to remember that any nation that decides making risk-adverseness the primary goal of their banking system will place itself voluntarily on the way down. The saddest part is that even developing countries fell in the trap of calling it quits.