When are regulators grilling Citi to be grilled on their own responsibilities for causing the 2007-08 crisis?

Sir, Katie Martin reports: “Regulators to grill Citi over role in sterling flash crash” December 10.

That’s OK. Grill Citi! But when are regulators going to be grilled on the crisis they caused by allowing banks to leverage over 60 times to 1 their equity when investing in AAA to AA rated securities; or almost limitless when lending to sovereigns like Greece?

And when are they going to be grilled on how their nonsensical risk aversion impedes satisfying the credit needs of the real economy?

I say. Grill Regulators Too!

I suggest that grilling could begin with the following questions that regulators have steadfastly refused to answer me… because I am no one to have the right to ask them questions (and FT has refused to help me)

@PerKurowski

A world obsessed with Best Practices may calcify its structure and break with any small wind

In reference to Mr. Flash Crash’s supposedly malevolent disruption of the market in 2010, John Plender writes interestingly about globalization, regulations and fragility “Global financial regulation meets a cul-de-sac” April 23.

In this respect I would like to recall a written statement that I delivered as an Executive Director of the World Bank on April 2, 2003, while discussing its Stategic Framework 04-06. In it I wrote:

“Ages ago, when information was less available and moved at a slower pace, the market consisted of a myriad of individual agents acting on limited information basis. Nowadays, when information is just too voluminous and fast to handle, market or authorities have decided to delegate the evaluation of it into the hands of much fewer players such as the credit rating agencies. This will, almost by definition, introduce systemic risks in the market and we are already able to discern some of the victims, although they are just the tip of an iceberg.

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. Who could really defend the value of diversity, if not The World Bank?"

http://subprimeregulations.blogspot.com/2003/03/my-comments-on-world-banks-strategic.html

@PerKurowski