The seeds of the next debt crisis are to be found in the kicking of the 2008 crisis can forward, without correcting for what caused that crisis.

Sir, I refer to John Plender’s “The seeds of the next debt crisis” March 4.

Plender writes: “From the late 1980s, central banks — and especially the Fed — conducted what came to be known as “asymmetric monetary policy”, whereby they supported markets when they plunged but failed to damp them down when they were prone to bubbles. Excessive risk taking in banking was the natural consequence”

Not exactly “risk taking”! The risk weighted capital requirements caused excessive dangerous bank exposures, not to what was perceived risky, like loans to entrepreneurs, but to what was perceived safe, like residential mortgages; or decreed as safe, like the sovereign; or concocted as safe, like what banks’ internal risk models produced.

Plender asks: “Has the regulatory response to the great financial crisis been sufficient to rule out another systemic crisis and will the increase in banks’ capital provide an adequate buffer against the losses that will result from widespread mispricing of risk?”

No, it has not been sufficient. That because the incoherent response to a crisis caused by AAA rated securities backed with mortgages to the US’s subprime sector, was to keep on using risk weighted bank capital requirements based on perceived EXPECTED losses, and not on UNEXPECTED losses.

Plender writes: “The central banks’ quantitative easing since the crisis, which involves the purchase of government bonds and other assets, is, in effect, a continuation of this asymmetric approach”

Indeed, in 2006, when an upcoming crisis was slowly being detected by some, FT published a letter in which I argued for “The long-term benefits of a hard landing”. Sadly, central bankers and regulators wanted nothing of such thing, on their watch, and kicked the 2008 crisis can forward to our children and grandchildren, as hard as they could, and here we are… with world borrowings up to the tilt, and lenders waiting to be blown away by a coronavirus.

PS. At this moment, this letter not included, in my TeaWithFT blog, there appears 2.948 letters sent to you over soon two decades on the issue of “subprime banking regulations”.

@PerKurowski