Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Regulatory overkill in banking?

That's the title of my last ET column.

At least some bankers think so. They see the proposed capital requirements for banks as too onerous. They are against any restrictions on investment banking or on size. Alan Greenspan takes a different tack. He thinks policy-makers and regulators simply do not enough to intervene, that the international financial system is far too complex for the sort of regulation proposed under the Dodd-Frank Act.

Greenspan is in a minority today at least among policy-makers. Both in the US and in Europe (and especially in UK), the tide is firmly in favour of tighter regulation. It's difficult to resist the proposition that inadequate regulation was a factor in the sub-prime crisis, if not the most important factor. My biggest concern is that regulatory reform will be late in coming. The biggest nightmare facing us is a macroeconomic crisis triggered by the problems in the Eurozone hitting the world before banks are shored up with more capital.

1 comment:

Mooshik said...

"The biggest nightmare facing us is a macroeconomic crisis triggered by the problems in the Eurozone hitting the world before banks are shored up with more capital."
- I understand that we have a problem if there are some defaults in the Euro region. However, these are problems created by the countries with huge social spending and an inefficient workforce? The solution for everything among the academic thinkers is "shore up capital". The crude similarity in the IT industry is throwing more resources (in terms of people) for any problem. That aint gonna be solved unless you fix the basic problem