Basel's Ingves Sees a Need for 'More Intrusive' Bank Regulation

在1992, Sweden faced its darkest financial hour since the Great Depression. A collapsing real estate bubble combined with a currency crisis threatened to bring down six of the nation’s seven largest banks. Economic output plummeted, and unemployment soared. In microcosm it foreshadowed the calamity that would hit the U.S. and much of Europe in 2008.

斯蒂芬inc., then a Finance Ministry economist in his early 40s, was drafted to take charge of the cleanup as head of Sweden’s Bank Support Authority. Working in collaboration with the central bank and local regulators, he quickly set about implementing a rescue plan based on a muscular recapitalization of the main banks and an aggressive program of asset sales. In parallel the government passed a series of structural reforms to promote growth. The economy quickly rebounded, and the so-called Swedish model has been hailed as a textbook guide on how to restore a crisis-stricken banking sector to health.

今天，Ingves是州长Sveriges riksbank., the Swedish central bank, and he is bringing his experience to bear at the global level: He chairs the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, a post he took up in 2011. The committee brings together regulators from 27 major economies to set global standards, and its toughened rules have dictated many of the key regulatory reforms that countries around the world have adopted since the crisis.

资本是改革的核心。在过去三年中达到阶段的巴塞尔III协议要求银行将资本相当于其风险加权资产的7％，比以前的4％。但是，由于危机造成损害，因此仅仅是第一次协议以来的基本核心，这是巴塞尔的核心。新协议包括一套额外的恢复性指标，包括流动性覆盖率和净稳定的资金比率，旨在帮助银行在一个主要的流动性危机中存活。统治性地承认银行可以操纵其风险重量，委员会最近同意将机构达成一个简单的杠杆率，其中资本至少占总资产的3％。

在gves recognizes the need for greater subtlety and variety in the committee’s approach. The greatest lesson of the crisis, as he sees it, is to “always worry about leverage.” No matter what its precise origins are, each crisis “always means somehow you create an overlevered part of society,” he says, and “some of it almost always ends up in the banking sector.” But no single risk metric is a panacea. “In a complex world the issue is to find a balance between all the different measures we’re looking at,” he says. “All of that is quite complex, and I don’t think any of that can be replaced by a leverage ratio only.”

银行刷新了多种要求，称它们是昂贵的，并充当贷款的制动器，但Incves是不受欢迎的。“我认为与监管机构过去一直有必要有点侵入，”他说。在他看来，银行需要接受他们对社会影响的影响的后果，这一影响符合财务复杂性的影响：“鉴于金融部门的困难为整个社会产生了非常大的阴性外部性，你应该在您在金融部门时，永远不会被允许允许任何您想要的事情。“

但是更复杂的世界真的呼吁更多复杂的规则吗？复杂性在最近在监管界中成为一个肮脏的词，许多人现在呼吁更简单，更令人难度的冒险加权方法来监督金融体系。在an influential paper delivered at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s annual gathering at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, last year, Andrew Haldane, executive director for financial stability at the Bank of England, said that “the type of complex regulation developed over recent decades might not just be costly and cumbersome but suboptimal for crisis control. In金融监管less may be more.”

在gves has some sympathy with this line; indeed, in a July paper the Basel committee explicitly sought suggestions on how to improve the simplicity of the regulatory architecture. But he contends that the aim of regulators must be to pursue neither simplicity nor complexity at all cost but to strike a balance among rules that are sufficiently specific to take proper account of the complexity of the financial sector and sufficiently simple to be easily enforceable.

Ever the student of complexity, Ingves declines to say what the biggest threat to global financial stability is today. But he stresses two keys to avoiding — or tempering — future crises. Regulators have to stay vigilant so they can continue to understand the different evolutionary processes that financial sectors go through. And they have to remain constant against the natural laxity that accompanies the passage of time.

“After a while, when you put in place new rules and the good times come back, people tend to forget,” says Ingves. “So it’s important to complete the work program, however you set it up.”

伯尔尼·施弗德克德的插图

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