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Sunday, January 24, 2010

Financial Times: 'Bankers to lobby for softer reforms'

by Calculated Risk on 1/24/2010 09:45:00 PM

From the Financial Times: Bankers to lobby for softer reforms (ht MrM)

Senior Wall Street bankers heading to the World Economic Forum will use the meeting in Davos to lobby regulators against a rigorous implementation of Barack Obama’s plan to cap the size and trading activity of banks.
excerpted with permission
That is no surprise.

The article quotes UK chancellor Alistair Darling as opposing Obama's proposal, from The Times: Alistair Darling warns Barack Obama over banking reforms
In an interview with The Sunday Times, the chancellor made clear that he saw serious shortcomings in the American approach.

“It is always difficult to say ex ante that you would never intervene to save a particular sort of bank,” he said. “In Lehman, for example, there wasn’t a single retail deposit, but the then American administration allowed it to go down and that brought the rest of the system down on the back of it.

“You could end up dividing institutions and making them separate legal entities but that isn’t the point. The point is the connectivity between them in relation to their financial transactions."
The Financial Times points out that "chimes" with previous comments of Secretary Geithner.