The Bank of England governor, Mark Carney, has urged the G20 to mount a big push to implement global regulatory reforms, fearing that governments may be tiring of nonstop rule-making since the financial crisis six years ago.

Carney was speaking ahead of a meeting of finance ministers and central bankers whose regulatory task force, the Financial Stability Board (FSB), he chairs.

Since Lehman Brothers crashed in September 2008, the FSB has coordinated a welter of new banking and markets rules to make the financial system more resilient to shocks.

In recent months, however, governments have switched focus away from stability to reviving economic growth, dampening some of the reform momentum.

The G20 meeting in Istanbul will kick off discussions on whether there are unintended consequences from the new rules. Banks are pushing for changes, arguing that the combination of so many rules is making lending and trading too costly at times.

“I worry about reform fatigue, not surprisingly, both at the FSB and more generally,” Carney said at an Institute of International Finance meeting on Monday.

“Many of the toughest reforms are micro-reforms that can have big political coalitions against them and have payoff very far into the future,” he said.

Carney has said one of the biggest reforms, now under attack from banks, is crucial to ending so-called “too big to fail” banks.

They would be forced to hold a large new buffer of bonds that could be turned into equity to shore themselves up in times of trouble without having to rely on taxpayers, as many did during the financial crisis.



Signed off in principle by G20 leaders last November, the measure has yet to be finalised.

Carney said that although the financial system was less likely to amplify initial shocks than in 2008, there was no room for complacency about its resilience.

Cost-effective cross-border banking was becoming “extremely difficult”, partly because of having to comply with anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorism financing (CTF) safeguards, Carney said.

“We are in a situation where we run some risk of financial abandonment, if you will, that we would have countries or a series of institutions effectively cut off from the global system because global institutions cannot cost-effectively assess AML/CTF risk,” he said.

“So the question is, what can we do, from the public sector working with industry, to make that more efficient, more cost-effective.”