Crash of 2008

Regulation

The fact that banks' assets, (which consist mainly of loans) amount typically to twenty times the value of their shares, makes them especially vulnerable to falls in the value of those assets. Governments have long been aware of the danger that a loss of confidence following the failure of one bank could lead to the failure of others, and eventually to "systemic failure" of the entire financial system. To limit that danger, they have traditionally required banks to limit the extent to which their loans exceed the funds provided by their shareholders by the imposition of minimum "reserve ratios" (see glossary) and have placed various other restrictions upon their activities. In the 1980s, however, it was widely considered that those regulations were imposing excessive economic penalties, and there was a general move toward "deregulation" . Restrictions that had prevented investment banks from broadening their activities to include branch banking, insurance or mortgage lending were dropped, and reserve requirements were relaxed or removed. In the following years there were major changes to banking practices, and they were followed by a series of banking crises . A study for the Bank for International Settlements later concluded that deregulation had left Spain, Norway, Sweden and the United States with regulatory systems that had been ill-prepared for the banking crises that they then encountered .

In 1974 the governors of the central banks of the Group of Ten leading industrial countries had set up The Basel Committee for Banking Supervision to coordinate precautionary banking regulations , and in 1988, concern about the increased danger of systemic failure led that committee to publish a set of regulatory recommendations that related a bank's required reserve ratio to the riskiness of its loans . In 1999 further concern about the danger of instability led to the creation of the Financial Stability Forum to promote information exchange and international co-operation in financial supervision and surveillance. In 2004, the Basel Committee published revised recommendations known as Basel II intended to require banks to take more detailed account of the riskiness of their loans.

Other financial institutions are regulated by national authorities, including the Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States, and the Financial Services Authority in the United Kingdom. Until recently, however, restricted-membership hedge funds have escaped regulation, and those that are registered offshore continue to do so.