July 31, 2015

In the movie “Mission Impossible: Rogue Bank Regulators”, FT could play a leading role.

Sir, Nigel Andrews, when reviewing “Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation” and because someone there says “Today is the day the IMF’s luck runs out” mentions this “Sounds like a case for the Financial Times”, “Fantastic nonsense of a mission implausible” July 31.

Clearly it not, since there “the Impossible Missions Force puts its lives on the line to combat The Syndicate, a group of global agents/ spies gone terrorist”

But what if the next Mission Impossible movie had team Cruise fighting against those rogue statist regulators who, for purposes of determining the capital requirements for banks, imposed risk weights of 100 percent on the private sector and zero percent on the government? That would surely be a case for the Financial Times. In fact then FT, with its silence about the distortions those regulations cause in the allocation of bank credit to the real economy, could even have the right to ask for a leading role in the film. Now if FT gets that role, I wonder who would play you, The Editor, and who Martin Wolf?

Of course, since there are so many expert technocrats/bureaucrats that play a prominent role in the Basel Accord incident, the production would be star studded. Because there are so many “Chauncey Gardiner" characters in the plot, it is truly unfortunate Peter Sellers is not with us any longer. Can you imagine how good he could have been as Mario Draghi?