September 21, 2009

Mr Caruana and his fellow regulators deserve months of humbling community service and being banned for life from any regulatory activity.

Sir when a previous member of the Basel Committee like Mr. Jaime Caruana says “Basel II is evolving” and was not a contributory factor to the crisis, and that “You don’t see a correlation with the adoption of Basel II and the difficulties” as is reported by Patrick Jenkins in FT on September 21, this is indeed an insult to our intelligence and to humanity.

Mr. Caruana is well aware that when the Basel Committee demanded from the banks a capital requirement of only 1.6 percent, which is equivalent to authorizing a leverage of 62.5 to 1, when the banks were involved with a client or a security rated AAA by the credit rating agencies, they set off a world-wide race in search of the AAAs; and which, over just a couple of years, led trillions of dollars over the precipice of the subprime mortgages in the US, and created misery for hundreds of millions of people all over the world.

The least Mr Caruana and his fellow regulators deserve, is six months of a very humbling community service and, of course, being banned for life from any regulatory activity.