Thursday, April 7, 2016

The regulatory powers of our bank regulators need to be urgently regulated, at least those of the Basel Committee.

What do you think the world would have said if the Basel Committee had informed it that it would regulate the banks, without considering the purpose of the banks? 

What do you think the world had said if the Basel Committee had informed that in order to make the banks safer, they were going to distort the allocation of credit to the real economy?

What do you think the world would have said if the Basel Committee had informed it that even though all major bank crises have always resulted from excessive exposures to something ex ante erroneously perceived as safe, they would allow for especially low capital requirements against bank exposures to what ex ante was perceived as safe.

What do you think the world would have said if the Basel Committee had informed it that even though the society considered that banks giving credit to SMEs and entrepreneurs was very important, they would saddle the banks with especially large capital requirements on account of those “risky” being risky.

What do you think the world would have said if the Basel Committee had informed it that it was going to assign a zero risk weight to sovereigns and a 100 percent risk weight to the citizens, and which indicated their belief that government employees could make better use of other people’s money than private citizens could use theirs. 

What do you think the world would have said if the Basel Committee had informed it that even though banks already cleared for credit risks with interest rates and size of exposure they would also require banks to clear for that same risk in the capital; and that even though any risk that is excessively considered leads to the wrong actions even if perfectly perceived.

What do you think the world would have said if the Basel Committee had informed it that because they could not estimate the unexpected losses that bank capital is primarily to cover for, they would use expected credit risks as a proxy for the unexpected.

What do we think about that even when the 2007-08 clearly evidenced the failure of the regulators, they go on as if nothing, using the same regulatory principles? I just know that neither Hollywood nor Bollywood would ever have permitted those creating the box-office flop of Basel II, to go on working on Basel III.

Sincerely, are we really sure all these regulators in the Basel Committee, and in the Financial Stability Board, are just not some Chauncey Gardiner characters?