Power Elites and Banking Reform

Uh oh – FT columnist Gillian Tett is quoting a French sociologist …
This sort of thing could get dangerous, but it looks intriguing. Drawing on her time in Japan, which prompted me to pull her book about the experience off the shelf, she reminds readers that westerners were constantly telling Japan they had too many [...]

FSA Liquidity Regs – Threat to London Banks’ Global Role?

The FSA’s new rules on liquidity management threaten to overload banks with reporting that the regulator won’t be able to understand while missing the source of the current financial crisis, said panelists at a Financial Services Club Capital Markets forum on 10 March.
Because the session was conducted under the Chatham House rule, this commentary doesn’t [...]

The FSA Needs a Rulebook?

It wasn’t so long ago – maybe a year or 18 months – that the light-touch FSA approach to regulation by principle seemed so much more enlightened than the SEC’s lawyer-intensive style with fat volumes of rules.  I contrasted the FSA approach favourably to the SEC several times in various blogs.
Now, that makes you nostalgic [...]

Fed and Asset Bubbles – How Hard is It?

The Fed is reluctantly thinking that it might consider taking action against asset bubbles in future. Chariman Ben Bernanke still says it is hard to determine a bubble.
Really? When tech stocks were trading at 50-100X earnings? When people in booming states like California were buying houses at 5-6X their income? When mortgage brokers were offering [...]

Basel III Coming in 2020, or Thereabouts

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 [...]

Bankers Still Reluctant To Accept Regulation in Crisis

Last month at The Forum in London, the MiFID conference sponsored by JWG-IT, David Wright, deputy director general, EU Commission, told bankers they should take the current financial crisis seriously.  “The firms that created this mess have to step up to the plate. This is not the time for firms to seek de minimus solutions or [...]