Philippe Carrel, SVP at Thomson Reuters, has been rounding up bankers, quants and technologists in New York and London to gauge the satisfaction with existing information on structured assets (very low) and create some standards that market participants can agree upon. Everyone knows Black-Scholes has some underlying problems but it provides an accepted way to value options, he notes, hoping that something similar may be possible in unstructured instruments which aren’t trading as an alternative to marking them to market.

His venture into financial diplomacy has acquainted him with the scope of European regulation.

“I am surprised to see how many regulatory bodies exist in Europe that I was not aware of. How is this going to work, how long will it take before you get a safe regulation? It took 10 years to implement Basel II and ironically it sort of fails almost on its birthday. I don’t think this is a way forward.”

Filed under: risk, Securities & Capital Markets