July 23, 2009

The too few to follow is more dangerous than the too big to fail

Sir I refer to John Gapper’s “Squeeze the leviathans of finance” July 23. I go way back fighting the “too big to fail”, even when they were thought of being “too smart and expert to fail”, but let me assure you that a thousand small banks following one credit rating agency are still much more dangerous than the too large to fail with thousands of analysts.

And by the way the problem with the Basel minimum capital requirements is not so much that banks end up holding little capital but that these regulations discriminate among borrowers and who therefore go through all strange convolutions to dress up in AAAs.