Third, that the system does not do business and exist on the basis of an implicit commitment that the State will have to use public money, the public’s money, to bail out firms that get into trouble. And fourth, that the public can place trust in firms and markets based on their reputations and the transparency of their dealings. Regulation is important and it can help to foster that trust, but it cannot substitute for the trust that the public needs to have, in firms and markets. The State is not there to support the industry, and regulators are not there to substitute for trust in and the reputation of firms and markets. Some important principles follow from the identification of the public interest in financial stability. First, a competitive financial system can only exist if it is rooted in stability: competition and stability cannot be traded off in a binary sense. Second, the public should not define financial stability as preventing all financial firms from failing. In other sectors of the economy firms fail without putting at risk the funds of the public or taxpayers’ money. We will not truly have solved the too big or important to fail problem and thus the public money problem until we have tools at our disposal which enable us to resolve large institutions if they get into trouble. This will create the right incentives for risk management. And third, regulators must use their judgement to mount a robust challenge to stop dangerous business models and investment practices.
This last point is vital. Financial services is an industry where arbitraging rules and regulations is habitual, even addictive. Money is made this way. We have no desire unduly to suppress enterprise and innovation, but doing the right thing and preserving financial stability means accepting the spirit of the rules. This is not a small change. Let me give you one important example. The new Basel agreement emphasises loss-bearing capital – capital that can bear losses outside insolvency. It must stay that way, and not be chipped away under the banner of arbitrage masquerading as innovation. I have been asked a number of times in the last week whether I think that the new Basel agreement sets capital requirements high enough. My answer is that if the capital buffers are in future genuinely loss bearing capital with no tricky wrinkles, and we keep to this outcome, we have taken a good step forward. Sadly, that was not the case with Basel 1 in the late 1980s when I started out as a banking supervisor. The consultation document on regulatory reform in the UK published by the Government at the end of July emphasised the need for a judgement-focused approach by regulators “so that business models can be challenged, risks identified and actions taken to preserve stability”. What does this mean?