Because selective hearing is human nature, everyone from Wall Street Journal editorial writers to Baseline Scenario bloggers has embraced a British regulator's speech that uses a dog snaring a Frisbee to illustrate an argument for simpler financial services regulation.
See, we don't need more examiners, the Journal concluded. A-ha, the big banks must be broken up, the economics blog declared.
But Andy Haldane's speech, delivered a month ago at the annual Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo., was widely misunderstood.
In an interview this week, Haldane, the executive director of financial stability at the Bank of England, made it clear his comprehensive plan includes several, related pieces.
In something of a grand bargain with the industry, Haldane is offering bankers simpler rules and less intrusive oversight in exchange for "structural" reform, higher capital levels and more examiner discretion.
"If some combination of structural reform, plus somewhat tighter, simpler regulation plus an empowered examiner gave a greater deal of assurance" that the next financial crisis could be avoided, "then I think there would be a case for a rather less intrusive intensive approach to supervision," Haldane explained in the interview.
"If I were the CEO of a big bank right now I might well accept that trade-off."
Unlike most U.S. regulators, who generally view their jobs as implementing what Congress enacts, Haldane is actively trying to shape financial services policy. He's basically saying that in the wake of the crisis, policymakers have done "more" and now they must do "better."
A career regulator, Haldane, 45, joined the U.K.'s central bank in 1989 and assumed his current role in 2009. He is a member of the Bank's new Financial Policy Committee, which like our Financial Stability Oversight Council, is supposed to spot systemic risks before they blow up.
His speeches aren't like those of our regulators, where you can simply flip to page 6 and read the conclusion. His "Dog and the Frisbee" remarks at Jackson Hole were actually a 37-page paper complete with charts and data analysis.
His intriguing image — a dog leaping to snatch a Frisbee from the air — is supposed to show that simplicity trumps complexity. The dog isn't using complicated formulas to measure wind speed or the disk's rotation; it's merely running along, keeping an eye on the Frisbee and jumping at the right time.
But instead of keen oversight and well-timed action, too many regulators are focused on a bank's technical compliance with prescriptive rules, according to Haldane. More attention must be paid to broader risks like a company's culture or the sort of business model it's pursuing.
Oversight is too reliant on the first of the three supervisory pillars laid out in the original Basel capital rules back in the late 1980s, he said. Pillar 1 is the rulebook while pillar 2 is oversight and pillar 3 is market discipline.
"We put all our chips on pillar 1. I prefer a more balanced spreading of responsibility between rules, examiners and the market," he said. "I think the way to achieve that rebalance is to start by re-tuning the rules. Unless and until you do that, you haven't got much hope of getting more weight under pillars 2 and 3."
This is so because when he speaks about intrusive regulations he mostly looks at it from the banks point of view and when I speak about intrusive regulations I mostly speak from the real economy's point of view.
The fact is that capital requirements for banks based on perceived risks have introduced the mother of all distortions, and which makes it completely impossible for banks to perform efficiently their utterly important resource allocation function.
By allowing banks higher leverage only because something is officially and ex-ante perceived as absolutely not risky, they are giving banks extraordinary incentives to ignore the "risky" like the small businesses and entrepreneurs.