American Founding Fathers never suspected bank regulatory power to be delegated or outsourced to a Committee in Basel.
Sir, I refer to Gary Silverman’s “Wasting Dimon’s time is the way we do things” January 17.
With respect to the complaints of Dimon about having to cope with too many regulators, Silverman deems this to be “as American as apple pie”; argues that the founders “believed the survival of a popular government depended on keeping any particular faction from growing too powerful”; and quotes James Madison with: “The constant aim, is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other”.
So is the reason why they delegated or outsourced so much of the American bank regulatory discussions and powers into a Basel Committee for Banking Supervision, that some wanted to escape from such checking-on-each-other?
I say this because frankly, the credit risk weighted equity requirements for banks concocted by the Basel Committee, and which so much favors the bank borrowings of the sovereign and the AAArisktocracy, over the bank borrowings of its “risky” not-rated citizens… in the home of the brave seems to be as un-American as can be.
Should the founding fathers have been more aware of this possibility and been more explicit in prohibiting it?
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