If the IMF and the World Bank bites the Basel Committee, that should be news.
Capital requirements for banks that discriminate based on ex-ante perceived risk of default, with higher requirements when risks are perceived as higher and lower when risks are perceived as lower, is about the only tool in the Basel Committee for Banking Supervision’s toolbox. This single tool is completely inadequate, even outright dumb, on two counts:
First, it is totally counterfactual as all the financial and bank crisis have always originated from excessive investments in what ex-ante is perceived as having a low risk of default and no crisis has ever originated from excessive investments in what is perceived as risky. The perception of being risky is as big a weight as it comes and does not need to be supported by additional arbitrary risk-weights imposed by regulators. Risk premiums reflected in higher interest rates that goes directly to the capital of the banks are more than sufficient risk-weights. If anything we might need regulatory risk-weights to make up for the risk of the ex-ante perceptions of low risk turn out to be false.
Second, these capital requirements unduly and odiously discriminate against those perceived as having higher risk like the small business and entrepreneurs, and who happen to be precisely those whose financial needs the society has the largest interest in that the banks help to satisfy.
That a Mr. Kurowski voices the above arguments over and over again is of no importance, but, when these arguments begin to find an echo in the World Bank and the IMF… which would mean that these two institutions would be the one calling out that “The Basel Committee has no clothes” then one could presume they get to be newsworthy.
Below is the link to the video where you can find the questions I made during a Civil Society Town-Hall meeting (minute 47.28) and Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s answer (minute 1.01.08) and Robert Zoellick’s answer (minute 1.16.32)
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