August 22, 2016

Ms Merkel, Mr Renzi and Mr Hollande. Do you want to tackle growth and youth issues? Read the memo or give me a call.

Sir, Arthur Beesley, Anne-Sylvaine Chassany in Paris and Stefan Wagstyl report on that the leaders of Germany, France and Italy will attempt to forge a common plan to bolster Europe’s economy; and that Sandro Gozi, Italian secretary of state for European affairs said: “Europe needs an immediate answer on growth, youth and security issues”, “European leaders seek to bolster economy” August 22.

Part of that is because the result of that a the €315bn investment plan introduced last year by Jean-Claude Juncker, European Commission designed to tackle youth unemployment, during its first year, fell well short of expectations.

Here is what I would suggest they should do. They should ask their bank regulators whether when they regulated they gave any attention to the need that banks cooperate promoting sustainable growth and employment for the youth?

The answer they should receive, if the regulators were honest, would be: “Not one iota… all we cared about was for banks to avoid the risks we all perceive ex ante!”.

At that moment Ms Merkel Mr Renzi and Mr Hollande should begin to get an intuition that something is not smelling right.

In short, the current risk weighted capital requirements have banks avoiding the financing of the riskier future, and just keeping to the financing of the safer past, and that’s not the way for our economy to move forward, in order to not stall and fall.

Of course, if they want further explanation on how inept the current bank regulators are, they could read the following aide memoire, or they could give me a call.

@PerKurowski ©