Some comments at a Risk Management Workshop for Regulators

Dear Friends,

As I know that some of my comments could expose me to clear and present dangers in the presence of so many regulators, let me start by sincerely congratulating everyone for the quality of this seminar. It has been a very formative and stimulating exercise, and we can already begin to see how Basel II is forcing bank regulators to make a real professional quantum leap. As I see it, you will have a lot of homework in the next years, brushing up on your calculus—almost a career change.

But, my friends, there is so much more to banking than reducing its vulnerability—and that’s where I will start my devil’s advocate intrusion of today.

Regulations and development. The other side of the coin of a credit that was never granted, in order to reduce the vulnerability of the financial system, could very well be the loss of a unique opportunity for growth. In this sense, I put forward the possibility that the developed countries might not have developed as fast, or even at all, had they been regulated by a Basel [Committee].

A wider participation. In my country, Venezuela, we refer to a complicated issue as a dry hide: when you try to put down one corner, up goes the other. And so, when looking for ways of avoiding a bank crisis, you could be inadvertently slowing development. 

As developing sounds to me much more important than avoiding bank failures, I would favor a more balanced approach to regulation. Talleyrand is quoted as saying, “War is much too serious to leave to the generals.” Well, let me stick my head out, proposing that banking regulations are much too important to be left in the hands of regulators and bankers. 

Insufficient purpose: Friends, I have been sitting here for most of these five days without being able to detect a single formula or word indicating that growth and credits are also a function of bank regulations. But then again, it could not be any other way. Sorry! There just are no incentives for regulators to think in terms of development, and then the presence of the bankers in the process has, naturally, more to do with their own development. I believe that if something better is going to come out of Basel, a much wider representation of interests is needed.

A wider Scope. I am convinced that the direct cost of a bank crisis can be exceeded by the costs of an inadequate workout process and the costs coming from the regulatory Puritanism that frequently hits the financial system—as an aftershock.

In this respect, I have the impression that the scope of the regulatory framework is not sufficiently wide, since the final objective of limiting the social costs cannot focus only on the accident itself, but has also to cover the hospitalization and the rehabilitation of the economy. From this perspective, an aggressive bank, always living on the edge of a crisis, would once again perhaps not be that bad, as long as the aggressive bank is adequately foreclosed and any criminal misbehavior adequately punished.

On risks In Against the Gods Peter L. Bernstein (John Wiley & Sons, 1996) writes that the boundary between the modern times and the past is the mastery of risk, since for those who believe that everything was in God’s hands, risk management, probability, and statistics, must have seemed quite irrelevant. Today, when seeing so much risk managing, I cannot but speculate on whether we are not leaving out God’s hand, just a little bit too much. 

If the path to development is littered with bankruptcies, losses, tears, and tragedies, all framed within the human seesaw of one little step forward, and 0.99 steps back, why do we insist so much on excluding banking systems from capitalizing on the Darwinian benefits to be expected? 

Too big banks: There is a thesis that holds that the old agricultural traditions of burning a little each year, thereby getting rid of some of the combustible materials, was much wiser than today’s no burning at all, that only allows for the buildup of more incendiary materials, thereby guaranteeing disaster and scorched earth, when fire finally breaks out, as it does, sooner or later.

Therefore a regulation that regulates less, but is more active and trigger-happy, and treats a bank failure as something normal, as it should be, could be a much more effective regulation. The avoidance of a crisis, by any means, might strangely lead us to the one and only bank, therefore setting us up for the mother of all moral hazards—just to proceed later to the mother of all bank crises.

Knowing that “the larger they are, the harder they fall,” if I were regulator, I would be thinking about a progressive tax on size. But, then again, I am not a regulator, I am just a developer.

Conspiracy? When we observe that large banks will benefit the most with Basel II, through many risk-mitigation methods not available to the smaller banks which will need to live on with Basel I, and that even the World Bank’s “Global Development Finance 2003” speaks about an “unleveling” of the playing field for domestic banks in favor of international banks active in developing countries, I believe we have the right to ask ourselves about who were the real negotiators in Basel?

Naturally, I assume that the way the small domestic banks in the developing countries will have to deal with these new artificial comparative disadvantages is the way one deals with these issues in the World Trade Organization, namely by requesting safeguards.

Credit Ratings Finally, just some words about the role of the Credit Rating Agencies. I simply cannot understand how a world that preaches the value of the invisible hand of millions of market agents can then go out and delegate so much regulatory power to a limited number of human and very fallible credit-rating agencies. This sure must be setting us up for the mother of all systemic errors.

The Board As for Executive Directors (such as myself), it would seem that we need to start worrying about the risk of Risk Managers doing a de facto takeover of Boards—here, there, and everywhere. Of course we also have a lot of homework to do, most especially since the devil is in the details, and risk management, as you well know, has a lot of details.

Thank you.