Yesterday Lord Adair Turner told a committee of MPs that Brown and Balls told the FSA to lay off The City. Brown and other Bilderbergers are now using the resulting financial crisis as a reason to call for world government.
Today the FT is reporting on Turner's appearance but is for some reason NOT reporting Turner's extraordinary allegation against Brown and Balls.
WHY?
Is it because a few months ago Brown's fellow Bilderberger Gideon Rachman at the FT called for world government, citing the very financial crisis that Brown and Balls engineered?
Is it because Rachman's boss at the FT, Martin Wolf, is also a regular Bilderberger?
Are the two protecting Brown and Balls?
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From http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4a237772-0375-11de-b405-000077b07658.html
UK banks to face tougher rules
By Jennifer Hughes
Published: February 25 2009 20:21 | Last updated: February 25 2009 23:00
A “revolution” in financial regulation was promised by the head of the City watchdog on Wednesday as he outlined a series of tougher rules for banks and hedge funds.
Adair Turner, chairman of the Financial Services Authority, told MPs that the light-touch approach of his predecessors had been “mistaken” and pledged to quell the “animal sprits” of bankers.
Lord Turner told a hearing of the Treasury select committee that tougher measures would include requiring banks to hold up to three times as much capital against their trading assets. In addition, there would be far more probing tests of whether senior bankers were “fit and proper” for their jobs.
He also warned that hedge funds “sufficiently bank-like in their scale” should have bank-style rules on capital and liquidity applied to them.
The comments come less than a month before of the release of a wide-ranging review headed by the FSA chairman of how the UK should overhaul its financial regulation in light of the crisis.
The review is also expected to lead to an overhaul of regulations on the structure of pay for bankers, credit derivatives and capital requirements for banks.
The language of Lord Turner, who became chairman of the FSA in September, was the strongest renunciation of the regulator’s past practices yet uttered by a senior official of the body. Asked about its previous supervision of HBOS, the mortgage giant forced into a merger with Lloyd’s last month, he said: “I think it was a competent execution of a philosophy of regulation that was, in retrospect, mistaken.”
Before the current crisis prompted a deep rethink of regulation, FSA staff had not considered whether banks’ business models were sufficiently robust because the watchdog had left that to industry and did not consider that its job, he said.
“You might find that surprising,” he said, before adding that pressure for the previous so-called “light-touch” low-cost regulation had come from politicians as well as from the financial industry.
Asked several times whether the FSA was fit for purpose, Lord Turner refused to answer directly. He said: “We are in the process of putting in place necessary changes.”
However, Hector Sants, chief executive of the regulator, told MPs he “completely rejected” the idea that the FSA was not fit for purpose and said the regulator was already “fundamentally different” from what it was 18 months ago, when the crisis really began.
Lord Turner said the crisis had to be viewed in the light of a “fundamental intellectual failure” around the world of regulators, politicians and economists. Asked whether he would have made the same mistakes had he joined the regulator earlier than September last year, he said: “I fear I would have.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
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