As a consequence of the financial crisis, however, there has been renewed interest in structural regulation, and the United States has now adopted the socalled Volcker Rule, which prohibits banks from engaging in proprietary securities and derivatives trading. There are, however, some significant exceptions to this rule. Britain took a slightly different approach to structural regulation.
This was guided by the principle of insulating basic banking activities within banking corporations from other functions (i.e. ring-fencing) so as to prevent the transfer of risk, for instance, from securities trading to basic banking. One of the recommendations of my work group was that banking groups should isolate proprietary trading within separate companies.