Articles
Who Holds the Tiller?
Conference season promised bonfires of red tape. Read closely, the more interesting contest was about something else: who should make regulation’s trade-offs.
With the Financial Services and Markets Bill due for Commons second reading on 10 November, I set the parties’ positions against a simple ladder – Parliament, ministers, regulators, supervisors – and looked at which rung each proposal reaches for.
Labour, the Conservatives and the Centre for a Better Britain all reach for the ministers’ rung, by different routes. The Liberal Democrats would hand much of the choice to a negotiated EU framework. The Lords went the other way: they removed two Treasury powers and added clause 25’s limits on skilled person reviews.
In 2023 the worry was regulators deciding without being seen. The risk now is ministers deciding without being seen either.
If ministers are to own the trade-off, three tests apply: write it down as an outcome, put it before Parliament, and answer for it when the downside arrives. None of the proposals on offer meets them yet.
The Referee Who Couldn’t See The Pitch
The Independent Commission’s findings against Manchester City have drawn attention to parts of regulation that are usually overlooked. The Premier League relied on the accounts it was given and could not look for itself. The harm fell on identifiable rivals, so the public interest was unusually easy to see. And justice was slow enough that some of UEFA’s charges were time-barred. Gavin Stewart argues that each lesson reaches well beyond football, to the new Independent Football Regulator and to the FCA and PRA, whose skilled person power is now under pressure in Parliament.
“As simple as possible but not simpler”
Regulators rarely make headlines for the right reasons, and the resulting gap in public understanding lets politicians and industry off the hook when things go wrong. Gavin Stewart explains why the gap exists, the harm it does to accountability and trust, and how Building Better Regulators sets out to meet Einstein's test: as simple as possible, but not simpler.
The Examiner We Never Hired
On 9 September the Lords voted to constrain the regulators' power to commission skilled person reviews. The debate was about how often the power is used. The question nobody asked was why the UK relies on it at all. Section 166 is our examination function, bought in by the day, paid for by the firm, and invisible in the budget Parliament scrutinises.
The unbearable lightness of regulation
Writing to the Financial Times in late 2024, John Glen — Economic Secretary and City Minister from 2018 to 2022, and so effectively responsible for financial regulation — said something that even ex-ministers rarely say out loud. The FCA, he observed, had become the convenient target for two contradictory demands made at the same time: that it should impose lighter and less bureaucratic burdens on growth, and that it should guarantee ever higher standards of consumer protection. His conclusion was blunt: "We cannot have both unless we agree the trade-offs."
Perpetual motion at Asheville
Two things I did last week. The first was to catch the final week of the M.C. Escher exhibition at Somerset House. It was an extraordinary show. The second was to read the statement issued by the G20 finance ministers and central bank governors, who met in Asheville, North Carolina, on 31 August and 1 September. The Chair’s Statement ran to seventeen paragraphs and was agreed by everyone present except China.
Three of those paragraphs repay being read together, which is not how documents like this are designed to be read.
Paragraph 7 identifies the common impediments to growth. Regulatory and administrative burdens come first on the list, ahead of inefficient tax regimes, inadequate investment and the cost of capital. The remedy is stated without qualification: simplify and reduce red tape and overly burdensome regulations.
Paragraph 15 sets out the financial-sector programme. Ministers commit to modernising regulatory and supervisory frameworks to ensure financial stability, and to promote the resilience and efficiency of their financial systems, in order to support strong and durable economic growth.
Paragraph 9 turns to the standard-setters. It calls on them to support private sector-led innovation and to commit to the principle that standards should be “well-calibrated and fit-for-purpose”.
Read on its own, each paragraph is reasonable. Read together, they describe a structure.
What Falling Enforcement Numbers Don’t Tell You
Bank enforcement is falling across every US regulator. The natural reading is that supervision has gone soft.
A new Brookings dataset (2015–2025) shows enforcement actions down sharply at the Fed, moderately at the FDIC, roughly flat at the OCC — regardless of which party held the White House. But a single falling number can't tell you why.
Run a simple exercise: fifty enforcement cases, five banks, ten types of misconduct, every case worth pursuing, resources for fifteen. Which fifteen?
The Economics of “What for?
"What is it for?" In his review of Robert Skidelsky's last book, "Keynes for Our Times", Lyndon Nelson takes up Keynes's warning that uncertainty cannot be dissolved into probability — that economics is a moral science, not physics — and why, in the age of AI, that is the question we most need to ask.
Data Delusions: Why the Industry Should Worry About Deregulation
Deregulation is presented as pro-industry, in particular as saving costs. But the opposite can often be true, especially over time. Following on from the recent article Lyndon Nelson wrote on the deregulation bills in the King's Speech, the article below takes a closer look at the idea of cutting the data that regulators require firms to provide... The results are likely to be messy and expensive, for firms as well as regulators... The present system needs to change but there are better paths forward...
Growth, Risk and the Trade-Off Nobody Wants to Own
The King's Speech on Tuesday included two bills aimed squarely at regulatory burden: the Regulating for Growth Bill and the Competition Reform Bill. The first will impose a statutory mandate on named regulators to prioritise growth and pledges to cut administrative costs for business by 25%. The second will speed up aspects of the CMA’s work. Both are framed not as deregulation but as "modernisation".
Fence and Sensibility: Deregulation and the Ring-Fence
UK’s deregulation debate is a dangerous game of Jenga in which no one knows which pieces are load-bearing.
Crypto Through the Tulips
How do you regulate an asset with no jurisdiction, no clear owner, and no one to hold accountable? Lyndon Nelson examines the "where, who and whom" problem at the heart of cryptoasset regulation — why bans and "wait and see" have both failed, why decentralised finance defeats the usual tools, and why fragmentation points to a golden age of regulatory arbitrage.
Big Tech: From here to the entity
Same activity, same risk, same regulation" sounds like plain fairness when regulating Big Tech in finance. Lyndon Nelson shows why it is far more complex — why context decides everything, why activity-based rules alone won't hold once tech firms turn systemic, and why an entity-based regime, hard as it is to build, is needed before a failure exposes the gap.
What happens when CoCos pop?
Additional tier 1 bonds are popular with banks that need to raise capital but are risky for investors and may be controversial when a crisis occurs. Lyndon Nelson looks at whether they can still have a future
Prudential Risk and the Art of Balance
Set bank capital too low and failures follow; too high and lending is choked. Lyndon Nelson traces how prudential regulation balances risk-sensitivity against complexity — from Basel 1 to "Strong and Simple" — and why the risks, like a dormant volcano, are forgotten but never gone.
Regulation, the 16th Century and the Need for a Clock
Be more agile," regulators are told. Lyndon Nelson explains why agility has a price: without better data — the modern equivalent of the clock that solved the 16th-century longitude problem — acting early on risks like PPI is guesswork, and demanding speed without it is the sound of a revolver being loaded.
Deregulation and a Game of Jenga
As demands grow to pull the regulatory bricks that feel most uncompetitive while everyone hopes the tower stays up. Lyndon Nelson uses a game of Jenga to show why no one knows which rule is load-bearing, why every choice trades one objective against another, and why the "no trade-offs" myth is the real danger.