£2bn, €1bn… and $19bn. Proposed bank levies so far from the UK, France and US. The tide of ever smaller bank levies appears to be turning.
American banks with assets exceeding $50bn and hedge funds with assets over $10bn would be liable to pay the costs associated with financial reform. This from a proposal by Barney Frank late last night during discussions to finalise Wall Street reform. More on ft.com. Read more
Profile: Sir John Vickers
Sir John Vickers has just been confirmed as head of the Independent Banking Commission
Sir John Vickers is warden of All Souls College, Oxford University, but has long been a core member of the British economic establishment. Until recently he was president of the of the Royal Economics Society and rare among economists in having held jobs in supervising both overall economic policy, as chief economist of the Bank of England, and detailed regulation and promotion of competition in individual industries, as chairman of the Office of Fair Trading.
His initial reputation was made in his analysis of privatisation in the 1980s, in which he argued that competition and effective regulation was generally more important than ownership in seeking to improve the efficiency of companies. Read more
By James Lamont
India has kept its hand well hidden at the table of the G20’s deliberations over how to prevent another global financial crisis. So the acknowledgement by Pranab Mukherjee, the country’s finance minister, that a bank tax is no alternative to better regulation is illuminating.
Senior Indian policymakers have been non-committal about International Monetary Fund-backed proposals for a global banking tax. They were similarly muted when Gordon Brown, the former UK prime minister, claimed to have gained wide support among the G20 countries for a global banking tax to fund future bail outs. The UK Treasury was seeking out India as a key ally.
Part of the reason for India’s reticence is that it experienced the financial crisis very differently from the west, and even some of its Asian peers. India’s banks suffered no threat of collapse, nor earned a reputation for excessive risk or returns. Policymakers are confident of India’s own prudent regulation. They are less sure of regulation elsewhere. Read more
The Central Bank Governors and Heads of Supervision yesterday welcomed progress made by the Basel Committee on Banking supervision, suggesting five areas of particular focus for the banking standards expected by the end of this year.
The Group of Central Bank Governors and Heads of Supervision (“the Group”) is the oversight body of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and comprises the same member jurisdictions. Read more
Darling slaps down King, gently
Alistair Darling seems not to think much of Mervyn King’s call to split banks into their utility functions and speculative bits, writes Chris Giles of the Financial Times Read more
| About this blog | Blog guide |
Chris Giles has been the economics editor of the Financial Times since 2004. Based in London, he writes about international economic trends and the British economy. Before reporting economics for the Financial Times, he wrote editorials for the paper, reported for the BBC, worked as a regulator of the broadcasting industry and undertook research for the Institute for Fiscal Studies. RSS
Michael Steen, Frankfurt bureau chief, covers the ECB and the eurozone's economies. He joined the Financial Times in 2007 as Amsterdam correspondent and later worked as a front page news editor in London. Before joining the FT, he spent nine years as a correspondent at Reuters, mostly in foreign postings that included a previous stint in Frankfurt, as well as Moscow, Kiev and central Asia. He read German and Russian at Cambridge.RSS
Robin Harding is the FT's US economics editor, based in Washington. Prior to this, he was based in Tokyo, covering the Bank of Japan and Japan's technology sector, and in London as an economics leader writer. Robin studied economics at Cambridge and has a masters in economics from Hitotsubashi University, where he was a Monbusho scholar. Before joining the FT, Robin worked in asset management and banking. RSS
Ralph Atkins, capital markets editor, has been writing for the Financial Times for more than 20 years following an economics degree from Cambridge. From 2004 to 2012, Ralph was Frankfurt bureau chief, watching the European Central Bank and eurozone economies. He has also worked in Bonn, Berlin, Jerusalem and Brussels. RSS
Claire Jones is Money Supply economics team writer, based in London. Before joining the Financial Times, she was the editor of the Central Banking journal and CentralBanking.com. Claire studied philosophy and economics at the London School of Economics. RSS
