September 04, 2009

Mr Geithner, and the rest of you regulators… you are so wrong.

Sir Timothy Geithner writes that “Stability depends on more capital” September 4, and he is so wrong. Stability depends almost exclusively on getting the right sustainable growth since with the wrong kind of growth you would need 100 per cent of capital and even then you probably only your real stability until you find yourself ten feet under the ground.

The hard truth Geithner needs to understand, and come to terms with, is that even if the credit rating agencies had been absolutely right in their ratings, the end results for the economy would be wrong; because subsidizing risk adverseness and taxing risk-taking, that is something that only a society that has had enough and wants to lie down and die does... and we can’t expect the whole world to be baby-boomers... can we?

Of course the regulators need to increase the current capital requirements for banks, but only for those operations where they decreased them so dramatically, like for instance allowing a 62.5 to 1 leverage when lending to anyone able enough to hustle up an AAA.

Mr Geithner please give us one single reason for why the regulators should specially favour banks lending to clients rated AAA. To me that is a pure senseless discrimination that will not lead us anywhere except over the next subprime cliff.