As part of the backdrop to that debate, he highlights the need for banks to hold more capital, which is properly loss-absorbing, and high-quality liquidity. He also favours reviving a supervisory culture centred on making forward-looking judgments about an institution's management and business resilience. But he stresses that: "However good a country's supervision, banks and other firms will fail." That requires decent resolution regimes, something the UK now has. As chair of the Financial Stability Board's working group or cross-border resolution, he describes the international plan of work on 'Living Wills'. Paul Tucker goes on to discuss the case for macroprudential instruments to address sources of instability that are beyond the circumstances and regulation of individual firms. He says booms are partly spurred by illusions about risk and returns along with ". a potent collective action problem in getting off the dance floor" such that "an intervention of some kind is needed from someone outside the dance" to maintain the stability of the banking system as a whole. He considers four issues that the debate about macroprudential policy needs to address, stressing that the Bank was contributing to the debate rather than advocating a fixed position.
Published on
22 October 2009
Press release