Yes. As Angela Knight, chief executive of the British Bankers’ Association says:

“A bank is like any other business – if its fixed operating costs go up then so does the price of its product. All the changes are good from a stability perspective but add billions to the fixed operating cost of a bank. The consequence is that inevitably the cost of credit – the price the borrower pays for money – will rise. The cheap money era is over.”

But I am sure Ms Knight, as a skilled lobbyist, knows that being strictly correct can happily coexist with being seriously misleading. The impression she gives is that tighter capital and liquidity standards will hit households hard through dearer credit and it is all the fault of pesky regulators. There are two big problems with this: first, the costs of tighter capital standards are only important relative to the benefits; second, the scale of the costs is more important than their existence.

Costs and benefits Read more