Forget the gnomes of Zurich or the wizards of Wall Street. The real rulers of the banking world are in Basel, and their empire is the Basel Committee on Bank Supervision. From that perch, these individuals develop the regulatory framework that all national bank regulations must work within.
On Sept. 12, the Basel Committee agreed on a new set of rules that are designed to make the global banking industry safer and to prevent the sort of crisis that the world has endured since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. Ultimately, the success (or failure) of the new regulations will depend on the capacity of national regulators to enforce the standards they establish. Thus far, their record is not encouraging. But after the near calamity of the past couple of years, their thinking may have changed and real enforcement may occur.
While there is disagreement about the causes of the global economic crisis that seized the world in 2008, there is agreement that its impact was magnified by an international financial system that was unprepared for a contagion of this sort. As investigators probed the Great Recession, they discovered that banks were holding risky assets whose values seemed impossible to ascertain — and which had been designed for just that purpose. Those instruments had spread to the point where almost every significant financial institution held some. That meant that as the value of those instruments evaporated, all the banks that held them circled around the drain together.