Welcome to a Better Mousetrap

Build a better mousetrap, the old proverb runs, and the world will beat a path to your door. It is a comforting idea — that for every problem there is a design clever enough to solve it, and that the reward for cleverness is assured.

Financial regulation does not oblige. The difficulty is not that regulators have failed to build the better trap; it is that the thing they are asked to build cannot exist. A regulator is told to deliver stability and growth, competition and consumer protection, innovation and resilience, all at once and without cost. Each of those is worth having. They cannot all be maximised together. No framework, however elaborate, dissolves that tension — it can only make the choices visible enough to be argued over, or bury them and pretend no choice was ever made.

That is the argument of our book, Building Better Regulators: The Art of the Impossible, and it runs through everything on this site. We write from inside the machine rather than from the stands: between us we have spent careers designing, running and questioning the regimes the book describes. The aim is not to alarm, and not to score points off the regulators, but to show plainly what the job demands, why it resists clean solutions, and how it might be done with the trade-offs in open view rather than denied.

You will find the book here, and the shorter pieces that surround it — articles and posts that Lyndon and Gavin write as the news gives us reason to, testing the book's ideas against whatever the week has thrown up. In time there will be more: a shop, where you can download the fuller case studies behind the book — the ones we had to compress to a page, restored to their proper length — and a membership, which will open some of those studies up at no charge and add a few other benefits besides.

For now, look around. The premise throughout is a simple one, and a line from the book puts it best: if we are condemned to live with impossibility, far better to do so with our eyes open.