23/01/2012

France and Germany wish to soften the Basel rules...

It's about a year ago that I outlined in this blog that the European politicians had a choice to either continue the introduction of planned bank regulations (leading to no growth in the future and Europa as an open air museum) or to postpone them. Today we can read in the Financial Times that France and Germany indeed wish to slow down the introduction of Basel 3 rules.

While I think that this is indeed the better way forward, things did change in the last year. We have become aware that our governments in Europe are quite unable to tackle the serious issues at hand. It took Merkel and Sarkozy a year to discover that their Deauville agreement with Private Sector Involvement was a shot in their own foot. And similarly they needed quite some time to discover that there was some merit in the banks' arguments on the timing and impact of Basel 3.

But why, why does it have to take a year before this sort of insights sink in?