A real review of UK’s financial system requires breaching the etiquette rules of a mutual admiration club
Sir, I refer to Huw van Steenis’ “An opportunity for the Bank of England to rethink its priorities” June 21.
Is he really recommending among other for banks to “use machine learning”, so that they can better cope with even more voluminous regulations…like that on climate change that has become so fashionable nowadays?
Well no Sir. “A review of the UK’s financial system to strengthen the BoE’s agenda, toolkit and capabilities” should, foremost, include a review of the credit risk weighted bank capital requirements.
That could start by asking Mark Carney, why do you believe that what is perceived as risky is more dangerous to our bank system than what is perceived as safe.
You could follow it up with: Does the use of this not guarantee especially large bank crisis, caused by especially large exposures to what was perceived (or decreed, like the Eurozone sovereign's 0% risk weight) as especially safe, and ended up being especially risky, against especially little capital?
You could follow it up with: Favoring so much bank lending to the safer present over that of the riskier future not risk weaken our real economy?
But of course, asking those questions and similar that shall not be asked is not comme il fautin the central-bankers’ and regulators’ mutual admiration club.
Sir, one single capital requirement 10-15% on all bank assets would serve us much better than the BoE’s entire current rulebook, distorting less the allocation of credit and bringing back into banking all that “risky” activity that has been expelled by regulators to be handled by other intermediaries.
But how would then ten thousands of regulators justify their salaries?
@PerKurowski
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