Our banking systems have been made especially fragile, because of especially bad bank regulations.

Sir, Martin Wolf writes “The world’s economy and financial systems are fragile … the most important source of fragility is political… In country after country, populists and nationalists are in, or close to, power. Salient characteristics of such politicians are myopia and entrenched ignorance. Inevitably, they spread uncertainty.” “Politics puts the skids under bull market” October 17.

In April 2003, as an Executive Director of the World Bank I delivered a statement that contained the following: "A mixture of thousand solutions, many of them inadequate, may lead to a flexible world that can bend with the storms. A world obsessed with Best Practices may calcify its structure and break with any small wind."

One of those “Best Practices” has been the risk weighted capital requirement for banks. These give banks incentives to create especially large exposures to what is perceived or decreed as especially safe, against especially little capital; making our banks, and the sector lending thereby favored, like sovereigns and houses, extremely fragile.

Populism? Sir, few things as brazenly populists as “We will make our bank systems with our risk weighted capital requirements because we sure know about risks. 

PS. Wolf, during the last annual meetings of IMF and the World Bank in Bali when interviewing Christine Lagarde, mentioned: “As a journalist I am paid to be skeptical”

But Wolf refuses to ask bank regulators about what they were thinking when they assigned a meager 20% risk weight to assets that because rated AAA represents great dangers to bank systems, compared to a whopping 150% for the so innocous below BB- rated. Sir, could it be you are not paying Wolf enough?

PS. In a similar vein during the interview Mme Lagarde said, “In IMF’s view capital flow management measures should: not be first order of priority, only be used in exceptional circumstances, not be a substitute for macroeconomic and macroprudential policies.”

So why does IMF keep mum about the risk weighted bank capital requirements? In a letter FT published in November 2004 I wrote: “our bank supervisors in Basel are unwittingly controlling the capital flows in the world.” Could it be that IMF still does not understand that that regulation distorts, controlling credit flows in favor of the “safe” present and against the “risky” future

PS. Ref the same interview: Trade protectionism? What neo-Bretton Woods Conference will be needed to help us get rid of bank regulations made to protect banks but that only endangers bank systems?

PS. Ref the same interview: Balance sheet vulnerabilities. Are not the consequences of central banks huge liquidity injections, with QEs, especially for emerging countries, precisely the same as those of the 1974 to 1981 recycling of oil revenues surpluses?

PS. Ref the same interview: Is the eurozone crisis over? “No!” says Mme Lagarde. After 20 years way too little has been done about solving the challenges of the euro and that, if not solved could bring EU down… and still Wolf categorizes his homeland Britain as “my idiotic country” because of Brexit.

PS. Ref the same interview: With respect to Greece, not a word was said about the EU authorities 0% risk weighting of Greece, which doomed it to its excessive public indebtedness.

@PerKurowski