As Charles De Silva opined in his October 1990 article on “The Law and the Central Bank: Issues and Implications for Banking Supervision in Trinidad and Tobago”, that was presented at the 22nd Annual Conference of the then Regional Programme of Monetary Studies, “The non-bank crisis in Trinidad and Tobago immediately called into question the capacity and competence of the regulatory authority.
But what’s the scope for harmonisation? Here, we should be bold, in my view. The financial sector is global in scope, and so should be the rules that govern it. And after the crisis, it was precisely this idea that drove the work on a global rulebook: Basel III. But since then, the political landscape has changed.