Can’t we just ask the regulator?

The Devil’s Advocate™ →Go uptown File:Conundrum with Whiteboard.png “Conundrum with Whiteboard”. (von Sachsen-Rampton, 1995) In which the curmudgeonly old sod puts the world to rights. Index — Click ᐅ to expand: The Devil’s Advocate Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

It is well known and widely reported that regulations have grown in scope, density, interrelation and complication since those mad, dreamy Eighties days when rules were for birds and the Randian spirit of Aleister Crowley was the dominant fingerpost showing the way towards market governance.

“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”.

The world of modern finance was unexplored: broken-fenced frontiers everywhere you looked, and you were free to wander amongst the hinterland unrestrained by official hand. This, contemporary thought leaders believed, was best for everyone, in the long run.

That was then: the cultivated fields of finance we till and tend today are very different place.

Now to survive its own auto-destruction, any new anarchy must quickly resolve itself into order, and well-meant gentle governance will in time calcify into deliberately ineffable rules and etiquettes designed to maintain the emergent power structure

What once seemed elegant now seems barbaric in its simplicity — and we have long since grown inured to the idea that our every authorised action or financial impulse should be minutely monitored, reported, and regulated.

Being a pragmatist, it is not the JC’s motive to take sides in between paternalistic nannies and red-blooded monetarists, other than to say however regulations are framed, justice and good governance — the well-rehearsed imperative for juridical certainty — requires the rules to be as plain, simple and clear as possible, and where, as now, those they are not, to be capable of simple divination and unjeopardising challenge.

If the rules aren't clear, the regulator should be able to explain them and, in the case of unresolved ambiguity, make a call.

Anyone in the business will know this is the aspiration of an utter fantasist. Anglo Saxon regulators wouldn't dream of giving guidance, perhaps fearing the precedent an erroneous ruling night create, perhaps acknowledging that their own staff have no better ideas what the rules are meant to mean than anyone else.