Pär Boman, at the end of the day, your children and grandchildren, and your nation, are your most important customers
Sir, Andrew Hill refers to that the chief executive of Handelsbanken told the “FT in 2013 that he had studied 5,000 years of credit risk, while the bank draws on minutes of board meetings from the past 140 years to inform its attitude to customer loans and business cycle”, “Creative forces”, “Boldness in business” March 20.
What a splendid occasion that would have been to ask Pär Boman whether in all that information, he had found any sort of evidence supporting that bank regulators should require banks to hold more equity against what is from a credit point of view perceived as risky from, than against what is perceived as absolutely safe.
That as you know Sir, has in my opinion introduced the most serious disruptive distortion in the allocation of bank credit to the real economy.
Unfortunately, in “Customers first”, Richard Milne later reports that Boman opines: “I don’t think it’s our role to have an opinion on whether the democratic system has taken the right or wrong decision. We see regulation more as a signal system from parliament on how we want banks to behave”.
That’s a shame. My opinion is that it is precisely persons like Pär Boman who owe their customers’ society, the duty to speak out if they feel signals provided by regulations could be taking banks down the wrong route.
Richard Milne quotes Boman in that the “main lesson [from] the 140 years of board minutes that lie in the basement… is that about every 17 years there is a financial crisis.”
That could be… but another lesson that should be extracted from that data is when did banks do the most for their nation between crisis and crisis… and I doubt the answer to that would be… “When we took no risks.”
On the web I find that Pär Boman has three kids… and one of this days he might have grandchildren too. He should never forget that, at the end of the day, they and his nation are his most important customers. And I am absolutely sure they do not need regulators like the Basel Committee and the Financial Stability Board to infuse their banks with dumb credit-risk aversion. That is no way how to finance their future.
And Andrew Hill and Richard Milne, your duty, that is to press Pär Boman and others to speak out.
@PerKurowski
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