June 20, 2009

We must learn to celebrate pruning.

Sir you are absolutely right when in “Central bankers strike back” June 20 you remind that “Banks too large to fail... is only one source of systemic risk” Indeed the opinions of the rating agencies and that the regulators incentivized the markets to follow produced much more real losses than all the too large to fail as a group.

And you are also absolutely right also mentioning that “it is even more important to make it possible for even the largest ones to fail. Indeed we must learn to celebrate pruning. In May 2003 while being an Executive Director at the World Bank I told a workshop of some hundred regulators from all over the world that “A regulation that regulates less, but is more active and trigger-happy, and treats a bank failure as something normal, as it should be, could be a much more effective regulation.”