On the other side of the Atlantic, one of those drawing breath was the then-Governor of the Bank of Canada, Mark Carney. I am not sure what Mark went on to do next. But it was not just internationally where the regulatory reform bandwagon was rolling. In the UK, the Vickers Commission reforms created a fire-break between banks’ services to the domestic economy and their other activities. Complexity scientists would have approved. And sweeping institutional reforms were also underway in the UK, with the FSA’s prudential responsibilities merged into the Bank and a new consumer protection agency, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), created. The return of prudential regulation to the Bank was not, fortunately, a reversion to the pre-1997 orthodoxy. The Global Financial Crisis had laid bare the costs of separating finance and the economy, the micro and macro – a separation that had also been a feature of the Bank in the past. Crisis needed to be the catalyst for change, forging a link between the Bank’s analytical brain and its regulatory hands. And so it was, with the creation of a new policy body, the Financial Policy Committee (FPC). The FPC was charged with safeguarding systemic risk in the UK using new macro-prudential tools. An interim FPC was set up in 2011 ahead of a new statutory framework being put in place. And the interim FPC gave way to a statutory FPC in 2013 when the new Financial Services Act came into place.
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