The life of an analyst of bank stocks is not for everyone. Much of the day is spent wading through regulatory minutiae, maintaining bloated spreadsheets and hacking through a thicket of acronyms such as CCBs, CCyBs, G-SIB, ATI, Pillar 2 etc.
A recent speech by a senior UK regulator has proposed making things simpler, perhaps too simple though. Sam Woods, deputy governor for prudential regulation at the Bank of England and chief executive of the Prudential Regulation Authority, laid out a vision of a new system of regulation for bank capital.
On the face of it, this sounds like an excellent idea, but it could actually have worrisome repercussions, further extending the arguably outsized power of central banks in markets.