Europe’s unemployed youth, is a result of expulsing testosterone from its banking system. Is it accident or terrorism?

To call banks cuddling up excessively in loans to the Infallible Sovereign and the AAAristocracy, an excessive risk-taking which results from too high testosterone levels, is ludicrous. That is just cowardly hiding away, guided by computer models, in havens officially denominated as absolutely safe.

The risk-taking which requires true banking testosterone is the lending to medium and small businesses, entrepreneurs and start ups.

Unfortunately bank regulators, by means of allowing for far less capital when lending “to the safe than when lending to “the risky”, guaranteed that the expected risk-adjusted returns on bank equity when lending to the former were much much higher than when lending to the latter. 

And, as any economist knows, equity goes to where the highest returns are offered. And so bankers possessing true testosterone, were all made redundant. And since the safe jobs of tomorrow need the risk-taking of today, and “the risky” got and get no loans, the European youth ended up without jobs… or even the prospective of jobs.

I have always thought this regulatory calamity was an accident resulting from allowing some very few regulators to engage in intellectual incest, in some small mutual admiration club where it is prohibited by rules to call out any member as being at fault.

But now, since more than five years after the detonation of the bomb that was armed in 2004 with Basel II, the issue of the distortion these capital requirements produce in the allocation of bank credit in the real economy is not yet even discussed, reluctantly, because I am no conspirator theories freak, forces me to admit the possibility of terrorism.

And frankly what is the difference between injecting bankers with a testosterone killing virus, and doing so with a mumbo jumbo bank regulation no one really understands?

Poor European youth… they are not yet aware that unless they expulse the current bank regulators from the Basel Committee and the Financial Stability Board, for being dumb or terrorists, they live in an economy that is going down, down, down.