Regulators, and FT journalists, suffer from cognitive overload and malfunctioning prefrontal cortex.

Sir, Christopher Coker’s “Technology is making humans the weakest link in warfare” May 10 is an extraordinarily enlightening article…among other for understanding why bank regulators are seemingly not able to correct what they should correct.

Coker writes “The digital world we have created may be outpacing our neurons’ processing capabilities [cognitive overload], forcing us to log off emotionally. The neurons associated with empathy, compassion and emotional stability are sited primarily in areas of the prefrontal cortex. In evolutionary terms, this is a recently developed part of the brain that is bypassed when we are stressed or overanxious. Emotions such as empathy and compassion emerge from neural processes that are inherently slow. It takes time to understand the moral dimension of a situation.”

Bank regulators, with the introduction of risk-weighted capital requirements for banks, which much favors access to bank credit for “The Infallible” caused, as collateral damage, that the access to bank credit for “The Risky”, like small and medium businesses and entrepreneurs became, in relative terms, much more expensive and harder to access. In other words the gap when accessing bank credit, between “The Infallible” and “The Risky”, increased dramatically.

And, since “The Risky” includes many or perhaps most of those potentially able to create the next generation of jobs, our young ones are paying dearly the consequences of such odious regulatory discrimination.

Having for years been protesting these regulations, I could never understand why bank regulators (or FT journalists for that matter) did not care one iota about something which in my mind could even be labeled as a crime against humanity. Now, thanks to Coker I have at least a clue; they are suffering a cognitive overload, which is causing their prefrontal cortex to stop functioning.

I sure pray they recover soon… or we will have to wait for those regulatory drone-robots which in terms of Coker could at least console us with “reducing the inhumanity so as to balance the loss of humanity”.