Tag: financial regulation

US Financial Regulation Debate

There is a broad international process underway, via the G20, the BIS and the IMF, to come up with new capital and liquidity rules to be applied around the world to replace Basle 2 (see here). However, beyond re-working these rules, the financial crisis has still left lots of knotty issues unresolved, such as how to intervene and unwind large complex financial institutions that are in trouble, how to regulate derivatives and whether more severe limitations should be placed on the activities of banks (perhaps through a return to Glass-Steagal style restrictions.)

Now that healthcare reform is off the agenda, there is a pretty serious discussion in the US now about financial reform: Paul Krugman has devoted his last two New York Times op-ed columns to it (here and here.) Here’s a nice summary of the current state of play. As always with US legislation, the process is bizarrely complicated and riddled with horse-trading, with a House bill and Senate bill, potential reconciliation, and a role for the White House and Treasury Department. But, to be fair to them, the process usually ends up forcing a serious discussion of all the key issues.

It seems that if this kind of thing is going to happen over here, it will need to be done at EU level, presumably with an active role for the European Systemic Risk Board (which comes into existence when?) Perhaps I’m missing it but I don’t get a sense that there is a parallel process at European level that mirrors the current US debate. It may be too much to hope for that Europe, with its patchwork quilt of different types of banks, regulations and regulators, will ever get its act together on this front.

Elderfield Speech on Financial Regulation

The Central Bank’s new Head of Financial Regulation, Matthew Elderfield, delivered his first public speech today at the Leinster Society of Chartered Accountants (text here.). The speech is an impressive statement of intent and forms a very clear break from the past. I was particularly pleased to read this passage:

High impact firms and those with a poor track record should not expect to receive the benefit of the doubt from me or my staff when the best approach to addressing a risk is a point of contention between us. We will have an open and engaged dialogue with a firm’s senior management. But if we remain unconvinced by management’s plans we will be prepared to substitute our prudential judgement for their commercial one and say: Just do it.

This Nike approach to financial regulation could come as something of a shock to our banks.

Financial Regulation in Ireland: Past, Present and Future

Governor Honohan made a speech last night on this topic: the text is here.

Reforming Financial Regulation

The Annual Report of the Financial Services Consultative Industry Panel has been widely reported, and in particular an Addendum which addresses the theme Structural Reform of Financial Regulation in Ireland. The Irish Times report was headed “Quality of regulatory staff must be a priority…” and captures effectively the views of the Panel to the effect that the structure and rules associated with financial regulation may be less important than the personnel recruited to carry out the regulating. The Panel suggests that at all levels of the regulatory organisation responsible for financial regulation there should be staff with the necessary knowledge and expertise in national and international financial markets and that this can only be achieved through the recruitment of senior managers from the financial sector, with appropriate financial rewards.

I should first say that my expertise is in regulatory regimes generally, not in financial regulation in Ireland or any other jurisdiction. From this generic perspective I agree that an emphasis on the people, the knowledge and the competencies within the regulatory organisation is correct and that this may be more important than the content of the rules (since an effective regulator can blow the whistle on practices which are permitted but undesirable). However, expertise is not the only requirement for a credible and effective regulatory regime. Such a regime additionally requires a degree of independence both from the industry and from ministers. The requirement of such independence is not simply a matter of legitimacy – there is likely to be limited tolerance for putting foxes in charge of chicken coops in the current climate – but also a key aspect of effectiveness.

Expertise is a complex idea. Industry experience is valuable because those who have it know how things are done and understand the strategies of those they are overseeing. They understand the narratives put forward by regulated businesses and know what to look at to assess their credibility. Thus strong industry expertise gives a regulator a form of independence in the way that it uses knowledge. But in some instances it is equally important that a regulator is is capable of challenging the working knowledge of an industry. On one analysis the primary failure underlying the current financial crisis is the failure of banks to understand the systemic risks which their actions created.  A regulator which fully mirrors the industry which it oversees is unlikely to be able to re-think the appropriateness of industry conduct, but only to assess whether particular businesses are within the normal range of what is considered appropriate at a given time.

A further issue surrounding the recruitment of regulatory staff from an industry arises from the observation that regulators who exhibit a high degree of shared experience (educational, industry, inspection) with those they oversee are liable to be less stringent in their application of regulatory rules than those with less shared experience. This ‘relational distance’ hypothesis, developed by Donald Black in the 1970s, has been tested and found to have considerable validity both in the context of business regulation in Australia ((by Grabosky and Braithwaite, 1986) and in the context of regulation of public bodies in the UK (by Hood, Scott and others, 1999). In the latter study we were struck by examples of regulatory design which opted for a deliberate ‘mixed relational distance’. So, for example, within the Inspectorate of Prisons, noted for robust independence and with a strong track record of re-thinking the appropriateness of prison standards, the head of the Inspectorate was routinely recruited from outside the prisons industry (a judge, a retired general, etc), whilst the next tier down within the organisation comprised seconded prison governors with strong industry expertise.The mixed approach can be developed at other levels of a regulatory organisation. In a small country such as Ireland we should be aware that shared educational and social experience is likely to be as important in generating low relational distance as shared industry experience. I believe this is one of the reasons why some have suggested a need to look outside Ireland for key regulatory officials in the financial sector (as has happened in the case of the Garda Inspectorate).

I do not think this mixed approach to staffing regulatory agencies is inconsistent with the views of the Consultative Panel. But it is important to recognise that an approach to staffing the new regulatory structures which fails to look beyond the experience and knoweledge of the industry is likely to be limited both in effectiveness and legitimacy.

Guest Post by Jonathan Westrup: Major Regulatory Reform?

We are pleased to bring you this guest post by Dr Jonathan Westrup of the IMI and author of the 2002 TCD Policy Institute Studies in Public Policy No. 10 Financial Services Regulation in Ireland – the Accountability Dimension .

” Further to Karl Whelan’s post, the government has clearly decided to radically reorganise the present unwieldy structure that, for the past 6 years, incorporated the financial regulator within the Central Bank.

Two features of the proposed reform immediately stand out. First, the decision to put responsibility for stability and supervision into one organisational structure rather than to have them divided between the Bank and the Regulator. Second, the decision to set up a presumably stand alone Financial Services Consumer Agency with responsibility for consumer protection incorporating the existing consumer directorate of the Regulator and the Office of the Financial Services Ombudsman.

What is intriguing is the Taoiseach’s reference in his speech to “international best practices similar to the Canadian model”. A quick look at the Canadian regulatory system, as Karl mentions, shows that a distinguishing feature of the model is that the Central Bank has never had a responsibility for regulation. Instead, since 1987, the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) has regulated both the banking and insurance sectors while Canada remains the only major country without a securities regulator, with responsibility devolved to the individual provinces. In terms of a consumer protection mandate, the provincial securities regulators all have a responsibility while, since 2001, the Canadian government established the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada with a mandate “to strengthen oversight of consumer issues and to expand consumer education in the financial sector”. However, according to its website, it has a budget of only 8 million Canadian dollars.

So on the face of it, the relevant part of the Canadian model to which the Taoiseach refers, is the hiving-off of the consumer protection aspect of regulation.

There is little further detail at the moment of the new regulatory system but there are some very important questions. We are told that a new Head of Banking Regulation will be appointed, but how will insurance and securities regulation fit into the Commission?  What will be the relationship between the Governor of the Central Bank and the Head of Banking Regulation, given the demands of the Maastricht Treaty in terms of determining the governor’s accountability towards the domestic political system? Will the present 50/50 funding arrangement between the industry and the Central Bank continue with the new model? What will be the powers of the new consumer agency outside the Banking Commission?

The government has clearly decided, yet again, not to set up a stand alone single financial regulator, but to go for a variant of the Twin Peaks model where all prudential regulation is the responsibility of the Central Bank and conduct of business regulation is regulated separately. However, in the Dutch case, which is the Twin Peaks exemplar, the conduct of business function is more comprehensive than appears to be the case with the proposed Financial Services Consumer Agency.  With details so limited at this stage, this assumption may not be accurate.

Many governments are wrestling with reforms at the moment, with the UK’s Financial Services Authority promising “a revolution” in financial regulation in their proposed reforms due before the end of the month. The government has moved quickly but more detail is required before making assumptions about how the system might work. Given the fairly immediate need to hire the new head of banking regulation, questions about the model will presumably be clarified very quickly.”