Free markets were set up to go bad, because of bad bank regulations.

John Thornhill writes: “The global financial crisis of 2008 exploded the ideology that markets always deliver the goods” “Three game-changing ideas to shape the post-pandemic world” Life and Arts, May 30.

Sir, that is the problem, because that is exactly what all those against free markets want us to believe. 

The 2008 crisis resulted from huge exposures to securities collateralized with mortgages to the subprime sector in the USA, turning out risky. 

And those huge exposures were a direct result of: Regulators allowing European banks and US investment banks to hold these securities, if these were rated AAA to AA, which they were, against only 1.6% in capital; meaning banks could leverage their equity an amazing 62.5 times. 

Securitization, just like making sausages, is the most profitable when you pack the worst and are able to sell it of as the best. If you can sell someone a $300.000 mortgage at 11 percent for 30 years, which was a typical mortgage to the subprime sector, and then package it in a security that you could get rated a AAA to AA, so that someone would want to buy it if it offered a six percent return, then you would pocket an immediate profit of $210.000. 

The combination of those two temptations proved irresistible.

The doom loop between government and banks was created by regulators.

Sir, I refer to Martin Arnold’s “Soaring public debt poised to heap pressure on eurozone, ECB warns” May 27

For the risk weighted bank capital requirements, all Eurozone sovereigns’ debts have been assigned a 0% risk weight, and this even though none of these can print euros on their own. Would there be a “doom loop” between governments and banks if banks needed to hold as much capital when lending to governments as they must hold when lending to entrepreneurs? Of course not!

In a speech titled “Regulatory and Supervisory Reform of EU Financial Institutions – What Next?” given at the Financial Stability and Integration Conference, in May 2011 Sharon Bowles, the then European Parliament’s Chair Economic and Monetary Affairs opined:

“I have frequently raised the effect of zero risk weighting for sovereign bonds within the Eurozone, and its contribution to removing market discipline by giving lower spreads than there should have been. It also created perverse incentives during the crisis.”

In March 2015 the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB) published a report on the regulatory treatment of sovereign exposures. In the foreword we read:

"The report argues that, from a macro-prudential point of view, the current regulatory framework may have led to excessive investment by financial institutions in government debt. 

The report recognises the difficulty in reforming the existing framework without generating potential instability in sovereign debt markets. 

I trust that the report will help to foster a discussion which, in my view, is long overdue.

Mario Draghi, ESRB Chair"

Six years later, and now even more “long overdue”