FCA- RIP Wheatley

Must be a tough job being the FCA chief…

Being the bobby on the beat patrolling the assets of the public can not be easy.

A bit like apportioning the village common among the peasants…

Unlike a village common though, peasants are not allowed. You can only graze on these asset fields if you’re in the elite. Trouble with the elite is that they have connections and lobbies.

The rules are simple on the asset common….

If you want more money, you take more risk.

Want even more money? Yep, you take more risk.

Of course, like any pooled resource, the individual who benefits the most is the one who abuses the resource at the expense of the group…

If you can palm your risk onto someone else then all the better, delinquent mortgage books dressed up as solid cash generators and flogged to pension savers springs to mind.

Yes, the logical action of the commercial whale hunter is to kill and sell the last whale. In the same way, the hungry finance man will find a way to leverage his piece of the asset common and risk bankrupting the country.

Why is it so tough being the bobby at the FCA then?

It’s hard to walk the line of mediocre… If you’re incompetent, you get canned but likewise, if you’re too competent you get canned. The reasons are different but the result is the same.

You have to wonder which one Wheatley was.

Either way, it would seems sensible to remove retail point of sale regulation from the more serious business of masterminding a robust system at the top.

Banker bashing maybe out of fashion currently but remember that it’s cyclical. Apparently, the level of bashing tracks the price of gold quite accurately.

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