January 06, 2009

No way!

Sir Andrew Large as a former financial regulator should be ashamed of his “Central banks must be the debt watchdogs” January 6 by which he wants to dig us even deeper into the hole we’re in.

He wants to construe “the necessary architecture and instruments to produce a more effective response to the build up of systemic pressure” ignoring that this itself could lead up to other systemic risks just as the regulators appointment of the credit rating agencies as their risk watchers led most of the market to focus on what these gorillas were doing and therefore never seeing all that was happening around them.

Let me be absolutely clear central bankers are incapable of scrutinizing systemic risks since that would require them to start scrutinizing themselves as the biggest source of systemic risk.