The point here is that all the benefits that come from simplicity, predictability, and transparency would be equally valuable in supervision—but necessarily much harder to obtain while maintaining the benefits of supervision, which are substantial if we are not to return to a world where half the small banks in the country will fail during one of the most prosperous decades in our history.
Keeping all this in mind, and given the success of our refinement of the overall regulatory framework, I believe it is natural to reflect on our overall supervisory communications, including our supervisory ratings framework, to consider ways to simplify it and make it more efficient, and especially make our ratings more consistent and more predictable.