Bank regulators, don’t try now to hide your responsibility for failures behind sophistications. It was pure hubristic ineptitude.

I refer to Andy Haldane’s “The Dappled World” 

Bank regulators don’t try now to sophisticate the reasons you all got it so very wrong. These were very simple.

You did not define the purpose of banks before regulating these.

You ignored to study why banks fail and kept to why bank assets fail, which of course is pas la meme chose.

You ignored that banks look to maximize their risk-adjusted returns on equity, before distorting the allocation of bank credit with your risk-weighted capital requirements for banks.

You ignored the monstrous systemic risks that putting so much decision power into the hands of so human fallible credit rating agencies implied.

You imposed you statist ideological preferences with the risk weights of 0% for the Sovereign, and 100% for We the People.

No! Anyone who has ever walked on main-street, and seen the difficulties those perceived as risky have in accessing bank credit would have understood how loony these regulations were. Frankly, you do not have to be a PhD for that 

Houston we’ve got a huge problem. Bank regulators and other experts don’t get it!

With Basel II, banks were authorized to leverage their defined equity:

Unlimited times when lending to AAA to AA rated sovereigns
62.5 times to 1 when lending to the AAA to AA corporates, the AAArisktocracy
35.7 times to 1 when financing residential housing
And only 12.5 times to 1 when lending to unrated citizens SMEs and entrepreneurs

And that of course allowed banks to earn quite different expected risk adjusted returns on equity not based on what the market offered, but based on what the regulators dictated.

And regulators, finance professors, FT editors and journalists, and many other experts simply do not understand that this distorts the allocation of bank credit to the real economy.

What are we to do?

The tyranny of [bank regulatory] experts. The forgotten rights of “the risky” to access bank credit.

Bank regulatory experts in the Basel Committee, and the Financial Stability Board, with their risk based capital requirements, by allowing banks to earn much higher risk adjusted returns on equity when lending to “The Infallible”, are blocking the access of “The Risky” to bank credit.

With that these tyrants are killing our economies… Who authorized them to such odious and senseless discrimination? Did we not become what we are because of risk taking? 

World Bank, IMF what’s wrong with you? You must know this is not right.

Note: Inspired by William Easterly’s “The Tyranny of experts”