March 27, 2017

Lucy Kellaway, what does FT’s code of conduct say about hushing up someone who sees something bad and says something?

Sir, I refer to Lucy Kellaway’s “Codes of conduct are in breach of common sense” March 27.

It would be great if Lucy Kellaway would go thru FT’s code of conduct in order to explain to me whether it contains something that instructs FT’s journalists from not asking the regulators the questions that must be asked, in order to try to make some sense of what they are up to.

For instance: For their risk weighted capital requirements for banks the Basel Committee has assigned to the AAA to AA rated a risk weight of 20%, while for the below BB- rated one of 150%. Why on earth do they believe what’s below BB- rated and therefore made so innocuous, is more dangerous to the bank system than what’s AAA rated and which therefore could lead to the build up of really excessive and dangerous exposures?

That only guarantees that the safe will get too much credit against banks holding too little capital and the risky, those who are just as worthy borrowers, will get much less or much more expensive access to bank credit than usual. That is bad! That is why, when I saw something, I said something, in about 2.5k letters to FT

But perhaps Lucy Kellaway must keep silent on this, since she includes in her own code of conduct, “Don’t do anything that you would be ashamed to tell your colleagues about.”


@PerKurowski