No coroner has asked for a postmortem examination of the global financial crisis to be performed by a truly independent pathologist.
Sir, Nouriel Roubini writes:“As we mark the 10th anniversary of the global financial crisis, there have been plenty of postmortems examining its causes, its consequences and whether the necessary lessons have been learnt” “Policy shifts, trade frictions and frothy prices cloud outlook for 2020” September 12.
Yes, many postmortems but none performed by a truly independent pathologist.
Had that occurred he would have established that absolutely all assets that caused the crisis were those banks were allowed by their regulator to leverage immensely, because these were perceived, decreed or concocted as safe.
And from that he would have reported, not a lack of regulation but missregulation; and not excessive risk taking but excessive exposures to AAA rated securities, residential mortgages and 0% risk weighted sovereigns, like Greece.
And after such a report it is clear there would have been a total shake up of that group-thinking mutual admiration club known as the Basel Committee for Banking Supervision.
But since that report would have contained so many of truths that shall not be named, it never saw light, and consequentially the lessons have not been learned.
Therefore the distortions in the allocation of credit have remained; something which has caused all the mindboggling large stimuli, like Tarp, QEs, fiscal deficits, growing personal debts that anticipate demand, and ultralow interests, to only result in kicking the crisis can forward and higher.
Sir, I have never been a bank regulator but from very early on I disliked much of what little I was seeing; and as an Executive Director of the World Bank I formally warned in 2003 against “entities such as the Basel Committee, accounting standard boards and credit rating agencies introducing serious and fatal systemic risks”
When later I discovered aspects like the runaway statism that was reflected into risk weights of 0% the sovereign and 100% the citizen; and the Basel II naiveté of allowing banks to leverage 62.5 times assets only because these had been rated AAA to AA by human fallible credit rating agencies, I could just not believe we had fallen so low.
Now, 10 years after the crisis, sadly, I am still waiting for any important authority to ask the regulators:
“Why do you want banks to hold more capital against what by being perceived as risky has been made more innocous than against what by being perceived as safe poses so much more dangers to our bank system. Have you not heard about conditional probabilities?”
@PerKurowski
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