Jim Surowiecki and John Kay both have columns today looking at the way in which regulatory structure failed to stop abuses in the financial-services industry, and wondering how we might be able to do better in future. " data-share-img="" data-share="twitter,facebook,linkedin,reddit,google,mail" data-share-count="false">

Jim Surowiecki and John Kay both have columns today looking at the way in which regulatory structure failed to stop abuses in the financial-services industry, and wondering how we might be able to do better in future.

Surowiecki says that we trusted the banks when we shouldn’t have: their incentive to preserve their reputation was not nearly big enough to override their incentive to make money. He’s right about that. But his proposed solution is vague: first, he says, prosecutors should “admit that fraud is a crime and throw some people in jail”, and secondly regulators should “be aggressive not just in punishing malfeasance but in preventing it from happening”. Well, yes. This is the rhetorical equivalent of throwing your hands up in the air: if you end up proposing something which absolutely everybody will agree with, then there’s almost certainly no substance there.

Kay, by contrast, has been looking at UK equity markets in detail, and has determined that the problem lies more with market structure than with anything within the realistic control of prosecutors or regulators. Surowiecki’s proposal basically boils down to “all you prosecutors and regulators are weak, weak people, you should man up and go to war”. I don’t know how many prosecutors and regulators he’s talked to, but this does them a disservice: there are serious institutional and legal constraints here. And what’s more, we can’t try to reform financial-services regulation by assuming that we can easily find a whole new breed of regulators: we can’t.

One reason why we can’t is laid out clearly by Kay:

Regulators come to see the industry through the eyes of market participants rather than the end users they exist to serve, because market participants are the only source of the detailed information and expertise this type of regulation requires. This complexity has created a financial regulation industry – an army of compliance officers, regulators, consultants and advisers – with a vested interest in the regulation industry’s expansion.

But this is in turn only a symptom of a broader problem, which is the way in which the consolidation and ever-increasing complexity of the financial-services industry has reduced the ability of firms to police each other and to earn each others’ trust, while at the same time increasing incentives to fraudulently game the system. Barclays’ Libor lies, for instance, started life as a way for its derivatives traders to make money: something which could never have happened when the banks reporting into the Libor system didn’t have derivatives desks.

A large part of the problem is the way in which financial tools which had a utilitarian purpose when initially designed have become primarily vehicles for financial speculation. Libor, for instance, was a way for banks to peg loan rates to their own funding costs, and thereby minimize their own risks while at the same time minimizing the amount that borrowers had to pay. Today, banks don’t fund on the interbank market any more, and Libor has become something else entirely: a number to be speculated on in the derivatives market, and, in times of crisis, an indication of how creditworthy banks are perceived to be.

Similarly, equities used to serve a capital-allocation purpose, and there was, as Kay says, a chain of trust running from investor to board to management. “Most asset managers want to do a good job – earning returns for their clients through strong, constructive relationships with the companies in which they invest,” he writes. “Most corporate executives also want to do a good job, leaving the companies they manage in a stronger competitive position.”

But that’s not the equity market we see today: “It is hard to see how trust can be sustained in an environment characterised by increasingly hyperactive trading, and it has not been.”

Kay’s conclusion is sobering spot-on: the entire financial-services industry, he says, needs to be restructured so as to create the kind of institutions which thrive on increased trust, rather than on maximized arbitrage of anything from news to interest rates to regulations.

In order for that to happen, we’re going to need to see today’s financial behemoths broken up into many small pieces — because at that point each small piece is going to have to earn the trust of the other small pieces which rely on it.

Of course, that’s not going to happen. And as a result, financial-industry scandals will continue to arrive on a semi-regular basis. When they do, they will always be accompanied by calls for stronger regulation: rules-based, or principles-based, or some combination of the two. But the real problem here isn’t regulatory, and as a result there isn’t a regulatory solution. The real problem is deeply baked into the architecture of too-big-to-fail banks. And frankly I don’t see any realistic way of unbaking that particular loaf.