Anybody who has worked in a regulatory agency – be it a central bank, a competition authority or a sector regulator – will recognise the immense technical complexity of the work these agencies undertake. We need to attract the kind of staff and inculcate the kind of ethos that produce work of the highest technical quality.
If our decisions are to provide certainty to investors and confidence to the society at large, they must be rooted in solid and reliable data reinforced by cutting edge analysis. The pressure to produce state-ofthe-art regulation is intensified by the fact that regulators should never imagine that one rule, or one mode of interpretation, is good forever.