August 05, 2011

Europe´s single market is not worth the Western World going down.

Sir, would you design an economic package that included a tax on small businesses and entrepreneurs to be used to subsidize a job creation program run by the government or the interest cost of triple-A rated companies? Of course not, but this is precisely what the bank regulators have done, by discriminating the capital requirements of banks based on the ex-ante perceived risks of default and which have already been cleared for by the markets.

That stupidity messed up the whole interest rate signaling system, creating excesses in public and triple-A rated debt and bank credit scarcity for the “risky” but most dynamic participants. The result is a crisis that we cannot get out of, without scrapping completely those bank regulations.

And so to read Jonathan Faull the Director General of the Internal Market and Services of the European Commission defending Basel III, with arguments like that any criticism of it amounts basically to sabotage against Europe´s single market, makes me angry, to say the least. “Brussels strikes right balance on bank rules” August 5. 

I have always supported Europe´s single market but if that requires having to live under obstinate and dumb bureaucrats who can topple the whole Western World, then the price for it is much too high.