September 26, 2014

FT, why do you keep on just blaming banks and letting regulators off the hook?

Sir I refer to your “Economics needs to reflect a post-crisis world” September 26. In it you write: “Having watched the global economy fall off a cliff, new students [of economy] will not tolerate anodyne lectures on the wisdom of markets.”

Well sorry, long before that they should concern themselves much more with all the anodyne presumptions that regulators know what they are doing. I know that FT resists believing such thing, but sometimes they haven’t the faintest.

There can be no doubt whatsoever that had it not been for the credit risk weighted capital requirements for banks, which distorted the allocation of bank credit to the real economy and allowed banks to leverage over 50 to 1, we might have stumbled here and there, but we would not have fallen of such a cliff like we did.

In November 1999 in an Op-Ed I wrote “The possible Big Bang that scares me the most is the one that could happen the day those genius bank regulators in Basel, playing Gods, manage to introduce a systemic error in the financial system, which will cause the collapse of our banks”

And still today… I am much more frightened by arrogant busybody besserwisser regulators not being held accountable for what they are doing than what I am by the market… and so should you be.