Daniėle Nouy, new chair of Single Supervisory Mechanism, should hear out those like me who detest current bank regulations.

Sir, I refer to Sam Fleming´s, Alice Ross’s and Claire Jones’s “ECB Super>regulator prepares to be unpopular” February 10.

Of course, as you know from my more than a thousand letters, I much welcome that Daniėle Nouy “As one of the regulators who presided over the setting up of the Basel II accord on bank capital, which stressed risk-weighted assets as the best measure of a lender’s health… now admits her thinking on how banks are assessed has evolved… and now [at least] believes the leverage ratio¸ which compares a bank’s capital with its entire assets, is also a crucial measure.”

And of course, having held that bank regulators should be faster on the trigger, so that adequate pruning was done, I also fully agree with her opinion of “Let weak banks fail”, as reported on the front page by the same reporters.

But, when Ms Nouy there holds that “One of the biggest lessons of the current crisis is that there is no risk-free assets so sovereign assets are not risk free”, I just can’t refrain from asking, why on earth did it take the current crisis to find out that, when history is so full of examples? Sincerely it is hard to believe that regulators were so naïve to believe that… so one has at least the right to suspect some other motivation.

And also, when Ms Nouy speaks about the “health check” of banks “which will include an asset quality review and stress test”, I get the feeling she has not fully realized the Basel Mistake, in the sense of the worst not being what is on the banks’ books, but what is NOT there, like all the loans to the “risky” medium and small businesses, entrepreneurs and start-ups, which were never made, only because of discriminating risk-weighted capital requirements.

I would dare Ms Nouy to sit down one hour with me to give her a piece of my mind on what wrongs the Basel Committee has made, primarily letting expected losses stand in for unexpected losses, and then on what I believe should be done. And she should not be nervous about that, since I absolutely share all her concerns about “it’s not the best moment in the middle of the crisis to change the rules”… though surely transitioning has to be initiated… without making it worse.