Gordon Brown is wrong again
Our former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has apparently admitted that the unaccountable quangos he put in place to regulate the banks failed.
He's right. His Financial Service Authority spent a decade subjecting every financial institution to a complex web of compliance - so much so that firms had to create entire compliance departments. Millions of risk assessment boxes were ticked.
But the regulator never seemed to ask banks the simple stuff; like, what is the real value of your assets compared to your liabilities? Or, if your business model depends on a plentiful supply of cheap credit to flog, can you survive if cheap credit dries up?
But having seen that what he created was wrong, what does Gordon now seem to hint at? Supranational regulatory quangos and agreements.
Mr B appears to envisage an even bigger sledgehammer to miss a nut, with a more powerful, less accountable supranational system. Strangely, for such a clever man, it simply does not seem to have occurred to him that maybe it's unaccountable, quango regulation that's the problem. It seems not to have crossed his mind that regulators who answer to no one rarely ask the right questions.
I'd hoped that IPSA presiding over MPs in Westminster would wake politicians up to what can happen when you put unaccountable regulators in charge, with a mandate to micromanage. Would an international IPSA body be any better?
With a certain generation of politicians, sending for more quangos when things go wrong still seems to be the default response.