Niall Ferguson, watch it, the technocrats can be as populists, and as violent, as any other populists can be.

Sir, Niall Ferguson writes: “Politically, most of the world has never been more boring. Instead of the alarms and excursions of the past, we now have technocrats versus populists. Any violence is verbal and the technocrats nearly always win.” “The nasty Greek outcomes that democracy precludes” July 4.

Hold it there! The technocrats can be as populists, and as violent, as any other populists can be. It is hard to visualize the possibility of any Congress or Parliament proposing to favor with regulations bank lending to the government, or to those perceived as “safe”, and thereby create a violent regulatory discrimination against the fair access to bank credit of those perceived as risky, like SMEs and entrepreneurs.

That is what the technocrats of the Basel Committee did with their credit risk-weighted capital requirements for banks. With hubris and populism, they convinced some they could distort credit allocations to the real economy with no downside risks.

@PerKurowski

PS. Europe, remember, between 2004 and 2009, ECB’s technocrat Mario Draghi was OK with banks leveraging more than 60 to 1 lending to Greece.