Special focus: Banking 2008 and beyond
Crime and punishment
Global regulators are poised to introduce draconian new rules to clamp down on the securitization industry’s worst excesses. But in doing so they could kill it off for good. Louise Bowman reports.
SUCCESS MAY HAVE many fathers and failure be an orphan but sometimes the list of potential parents can be pretty daunting. The wholesale failure of the securitization market over the past year has been laid at the door of almost everyone involved, from originators to rating agencies to regulators and to the investors themselves. How to fix the market is proving an equally hard nut to crack but one for which again all involved bear a weighty responsibility. And perhaps the regulators bear this more than most because of the political pressure upon them to ensure that such a catastrophic market dislocation cannot happen again.
In its report, Enhancing market and institutional resilience, the Financial Stability Forum identified strengthening the authorities' responsiveness to risks as one of its five main recommendations. "Regulators need to raise their game," stated Svein Andresen, member of the FSF secretariat at the Bank for International Settlements during the Global ABS conference in Cannes in June.
