ABSTRACT
The years since 2008 have seen much public blaming, naming and shaming of a wide range of individuals and institutions. These include senior management of financial institutions, individual traders in certain wholesale financial markets as well as those both within out side regulatory bodies who set the intellectual tone and strategic direction for financial regulation prior to the financial crisis of 2008. That latter category has encompassed the regulator’s political masters, as well as the regulators themselves, insofar as a virtue was made by certain politicians of the competitive advantage of the ‘light touch’ and ‘principles based’ regime of financial regulation that pertained in the UK prior to 2008, and indeed of the initial political judgement of New Labour in the UK that led to the creation of the FSA as a unitary financial regulator in 1998 and the removal of direct powers of bank supervision from the Bank of England that accompanied it. Indeed, even the UK Queen was reported to have expressed interest and concern in the effectiveness of the powers of financial supervisors to achieve their objectives in an observation made during a recent visit to the Bank of England, that the Financial Services Authority did not have any ‘teeth’ (Rayner, 2012).
