Crisis mismanagement

The world’s bank regulators are looking flat-footed. They have been a step behind in a series of financial crises – subprime mortgages in the US, off balance-sheet liabilities in German, disappearing wholesale funding in UK’s Northern Rock and now fraud at France’s Société Générale. Without some improvements, national-based banking regulation is too balkanised to cope with a globalized world. Regulators don’t talk enough to each other. When SocGen discovered that a rogue trader had barrelled a g...