Articles
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.
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