Who can spot the risks?
The grand circle that regulators have to square is this: how to establish a framework of regulation that accommodates the characteristics of the traditional specialised banking system and mark it off from other businesses. With the sort of diversified financial services that are actually evolving, the era of strictly compartmentalised financial institutions is passing, leaving the regulatory system designed to match it looking increasingly out of date.
A single omnipotent, omniscient regulator for all financial services remains dream. Many say it will stay that way, pointing out how long it took to get agreement just on rudimentary international rules for the capital adequacy of banks. Yet regulators everywhere acknowledge the need to cooperate more closely with their opposite numbers across industrial and geographical boundaries. They also agree that greater harmonisation of regulatory standards on everything from reporting requirements to risk assessment will come surely, if slowly.
Much of that is likely to be mere tidying up. A good place to start in America would be scrapping the separate regulation of thrifts, If they have been there is little reason not to regulate them as banks (and especially given the mess thrift regulators have made of the job) . It is what Japan has sensibly done by making its equivalent of thrifts, so go banks, choose to be either credit unions or to become commercial banks. Britain, too, has let those of its building societies with ambitions to be banks, and to be regulated as such.
These are moves in another right direction to switch away from regulation by institution, as mostly happens now, to regulation by function. This means that regulation becomes a matter of supervising what is done rather than who does it.
Unsystematic deregulation has brought the system to its present ugly pass. This has left an increasing number of competitive anomalies. Much of the pressure for, and resistance to, further change comes from those institutions that wish to alleviate or entrench their market disadvantage. In both America and Japan, the debates about reforming the domestic financial systems, and in particular about updating Glass - Steagall and Article 65 respectively, have been slowed by political horse - trading. This is making worse a situation in which competition is keeping the prices of many financial services artificially low and capacity artificially great in a way that cannot be sustained for long. Systemic risk gets greater, not less, the longer the system is skewed.
The point is long past at which regulators might have been able to force market practices back into the old regulatory framework. The global competitive and technological forces against them are too powerful. Neither is the option of turning back the clock through re - regulation feasible, and few regulators show signs either of wanting to undertake such a course, or of having the stomach for the political fight it would entail. Even in Japan, where regulators hold a sway over their industries that their counterparts in Europe and America can only envy, and where the financial system is being emerging new economy. This is being done with the grain of market forces, not against it.
Types of risks
So far we have used the term "risk" rather loosely. One type of risk is default risk, that is, the risk that the borrower will simply not repay the loan, due to either dishonesty or plain inability to do so. Another type of risk, called purchasing - power risk, is the risk that, due to an unexpectedly high inflation rate, the future interest payments, and the principal of the loan when finally repaid, will have less purchasing power than the lender anticipated at the time the loan was made. A similar risk is faced by borrowers. A borrower may cheerfully agree to pay, say, 15 percent interest, expecting that a 12 percent inflation rate will reduce the real value of the loan. But inflation may be only 4 percent.
A third type of risk is called "interest - rate risk" or "market risk", that is, the risk that the market value of a security will fall because interest rates will rise. We will discuss this further later; here we just present the intuitive idea. Suppose that five years ago you bought a ten-year 1 000 bond carrying a 6 percent interest rate, and tile interest rate now obtainable on similar bonds also have five years to go until they mature is 8 percent. Would anyone pay 1 000 for your bond? Surely not, because they could earn 80 per year by buying a new bond, and only 60 per year by buying your bond. Hence, to sell your bond you would have to reduce its price. But suppose the bond, instead of having five years to maturity, would mature in, say, ninety days, what would its price be then? It would still be less than 1 000 since the buyer would get 6 percent instead of 8 percent interest for ninety days; but since getting a lower interest sell for only ninety days does not involve much of a loss, the bond would sell for something close to 1 000. Hence, while holding any security with a fixed interest rate involves some interest - rate risk, the closer to maturity a security is, the lower is this risk. On the other hand, if interest rates fall you gain because your bond is worth more; and the longer the time until the bond matures, the greater is your gain. But the fact that you may gain as well as lose does not mean that you are taking no risk.
Diversification
All three types of risks are relevant for deciding what assets to include in a portfolio, and what debts to have outstanding. (The term portfolio means the collection of assets one owns.) Anyone holding more than one type of asset has to consider not the risk of each asset taken by itself, but the totality of the risk on various assets and debts jointly. Suppose someone holds stock in a company that is likely to gain from inflation. The riskiness of a portfolio that combines both of these stocks may be less than the riskiness of each stock taken separately. A port- folio consisting of assets that are affected in opposite directions by given future events is less risky than are the assets that compose it when taken individually. Hence a low-risk portfolio need not contain only assets that individually have little risk; sometimes one reduces the riskiness of a portfolio by adding some high - risk assets that offset the risks of other assets in it.