June 22, 2012

What does Michel Barnier know about fairness?

Sir, Michel Barnier, the EU commissioner overseeing financial services calls on US authorities to apply regulations fairly, “The US must not seek to override EU regulators” June 22. Frankly, what does Michael Barnier, and other regulators know about fairness?

The regulators forced those perceived as risky and who therefore already had to pay higher interest rates, had less access to bank credit, and needed to accept harsher terms for their borrowings, to be additionally discriminated against, by means of causing higher capital requirements for banks than what is the case when banks lend to those officially perceived as not risky.

If that is not unfair what is? Especially when considering that no bank crisis ever has resulted from excessive exposures to what was perceived as risky, as these have always, except when pure fraud was present, resulted from excessive exposure to what had been believed to be absolutely not risky. 

And by discriminating that way so unfairly against the risky, the regulators themselves caused the current crisis, which is something they would have known had they dared to run a simple regression between the real current bank loan problems and their lower capital requirements, as it would have shown a correlation of 1.