Regulação dos mercados financeiros

Martin Wolf, no Financial Times, em Why financial regulation is both difficult and essential, discute, de maneira instrutiva, a bondade de códigos de conduta voluntários que a comunidade bancária tem vindo a propor como modo de evitar uma maior amplitude de intervenção das entidades reguladoras. Não está convencido disso, embora, por outro lado, também não acredite na infabilidade da regulação - excertos do artigo:

"... First, in such a fiercely competitive business, a voluntary code is almost certainly not worth the paper it is written on. When they can get away with behaving irresponsibly, some will do so. This puts strong pressure on others. That is what Chuck Prince, former chief executive officer of Citigroup, meant when he told the FT that “as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance”. So, as Willem Buiter of the London School of Economics remarks: “Self-regulation stands in relation to regulation the way self-importance stands in relation to importance.”

Second, the industry has form. The IIF itself was founded in 1983 in response to the developing country debt crisis. At that time, big parts of the west’s banking system were in effect bankrupt. Now, many upsets later, we have reached the “subprime crisis”. The IIF was created not only to represent the industry, but to improve its performance. It is clear that this has not worked...

...But competition does not work well in finance. The “product” of the financial industry is promises for an uncertain future, marketed as dreams that can readily become nightmares. Customers are readily swept away by exaggerated promises, irrational beliefs, misplaced trust and sheer skulduggery. So, too, are practitioners: basing risk management on limited data and inadequate models is a good example. Emotions count wherever uncertainties loom.
Boeing would not survive if the aircraft it built fell out of the sky. Yet in the financial industry, huge blunders are also almost always made in common. If everybody is in the dance nobody is to blame and, in any case, governments, horrified by the consequences of a collapsing financial system, will come to the rescue...

...Yet I am not that optimistic about regulation either. Regulators are doomed to close the stable doors behind financial institutions that always find new and more exciting ways of losing money. It is, for this reason, crucial that the institutions, and unsecured creditors, feel some pain: the burned child fears the fire; singeing is less effective. Yet the fire must never burn too far, since that might destroy the entire economy.

If regulation is to be effective, it must cover all relevant institutions and the entire balance sheet, in all significant countries; it must focus on capital, liquidity and transparency; and, not least, it must make finance less pro-cyclical. Will it ever work perfectly? Certainly not. It is impossible and probably even undesirable to create a crisis-free financial system. Crises will always be with us. But we can surely do far better than we have been doing. In any case, we are doomed to try."