Right battlefield, wrong combatants!

Sir John Plender in “Rules will decide the New York vs London Battle”, April 7, considers that one reasonable safe bet is that a new Basel agreement… will provide the basis for a level playing field on capital and liquidity” though “where the balance will fall between the two financial centres on all this is anyone’s guess”. Are we going to fall again for the same trick? It was with the excuse of reducing regulatory arbitration between banking centres that Basel created the regulations that served as growth hormones for the big banks. It is not about New York against London, Basel might be the battlefield, but the combatants are the too-big-to-fail banks and the underdogs, the too-small-to-matter-to-the-regulators banks.