Learning from Regulatory Diversity

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As we look ahead toward how we can do a better job of preventing, or at least lessening the effects of the next financial crisis, I think we can all agree that the more information regulators have about the real world conditions in the market–the nature of the products, the institutional contexts in which business decisions are being made, and the character of the risks–the better.  The question is, what is the best way for regulators to get such information?

One of the big Ahas of my current research at the Bank of Japan is that different regulatory systems, or cultures, may have different approaches to getting such information.  In the United States and in the UK, there is a big emphasis on hiring regulators with practical market experience.  US and UK regulators know that such individuals can be invaluable because they understand the thinking of market insiders.  Ironically, such individuals often turn out to be the toughest regulators of all as they are least likely to be snowed by bogus excuses about the impossibility of implementation of a certain reform, or the unavailability of a certain kind of information.  Think Gary Gensler, former Goldman Sachs executive now head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for example.

There is no doubt that this kind of talent is one important route to information.  Japanese regulatory institutions have relatively few such people, and in my interviews some Japanese regulators have suggested that it would be helpful to have more.

But Japanese regulators have a different approach: they maintain much more intensive, almost real-time contacts with their counterparts in the industry.  For example, a junior regulator may have his counterpart in a given bank on the phone two or three times a day.  In addition there are yearly on-site inspections that last several weeks and provide mini “fieldwork” opportunities for regulators to sit on the inside, as well as multiple “targeted inspections” also on-site.  There are daily or weekly contacts at every level of the bank and government, too, from the most junior to the most senior, since one gets a different picture of what is going on inside a financial institution depending on who one talks to.

One advantage of this approach is that in a world in which market realities change very quickly the regulator’s information is very current.  In contrast one problem with the US-UK approach is that after only a few years in government, a former banker’s experience quickly becomes relatively obsolete.

Perhaps here regulatory theory could benefit from the insights of the field of comparative law. Comparative lawyers know that it is pointless to argue about which system in the world is “best” in some absolute sense. French law and American law each have their relative strengths and weaknesses, but more importantly reflect an adaptation to the wider culture and values of the societies out of which they emerge.  Studying these differences can sometimes provide insights for reform (a French court may wish to borrow some precedent from an American court or vice versa) and can also help sharpen, through the contrast, each side’s appreciation of what they value the most. In much the same way, regulatory cultures are different, and interesting in their differences.  Perhaps rather than throw all our energies into defining one global regulatory approach or standard, we could start by noticing these differences, describing them, and analyzing their relative strengths and weaknesses as well as their cultural sources and purposes within each institutional and economic context.

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