With respect to realizing bank regulators do not know what they’re doing, FT has clearly not reached maturity.

Sir, Janan Ganesh writes: “Maturity is the realisation that adults do not know what they are doing. Grown-ups are not omniscient, just fallible humans trying their best in a difficult world.” “The markets hold more sway than May” October 18.

Indeed that is why in a letter you published in January 2003, before I became de facto censored by FT, I wrote: “Everyone knows that, sooner or later, the ratings issued by the [human fallible] credit agencies are just a new breed of systemic errors, about to be propagated at modern speeds.”

Here is the shorter version of the generally unknown lunacy of the current risk weighted capital requirements for banks:

1. If you allow banks to leverage their equity, or the support they receive from society, more with some assets than with other, then you will dengerously distort the allocation of credit to the real economy.

2. And all that distortion for nothing. What is dangerous for bank systems, is never what is ex ante perceived as risky, but always either some unexpected event, or the build-up of dangerous excessive exposures to something that ex ante was perceived as safe but that ex post turned out not to be.

You all in FT, grow up, mature, understand that current bank regulators haven’t the faintest on what they’re doing.

PS. Here again is a somewhat more extensive aide memoire on the monstrous mistakes of the current capital requirements for banks.

@PerKurowski Janan

How do politicians stand such failed technocrats as those in the Basel Committee and Financial Stability Board?

Sir, you quote BoE’s Mark Carney saying: “The objectives are what are set by the politicians. The policies are done by technocrats,” “Carney’s gentle reminder about BoE independence” October 17.

So let us assume that having banks perform the allocation of bank credit to the real economy as efficiently as possible, while at the same time ascertaining the stability of the banking sector, would be a reasonable objective set by the politicians. In fact I challenge you to find a politician who would dare to disagree with that objective.

But now let’s see what policies the technocrats, like Mark Carney, the current chairman of the G20s Financial Stability Board, and his colleagues on the Basel Committee have come up with.

They have imposed risk weighted capital requirements for banks that, allowing banks to leverage their equity and the implicit support these receive from society differently, based on ex ante perceived risks already cleared for, utterly distort the allocation of bank credit to the real economy.

And they designed that regulation based on the premise that what is ex ante perceived as risky is risky for the bank system, thereby completely ignoring all empirical evidences that clearly show that what’s really dangerous to the bank systems, is unexpected events and excessive exposures to what was ex ante perceived as safe but that ex post turned out to be very risky.

So the real question Sir would be: How do politician stand for such lousy technocrats?

@PerKurowski ©