James Saft

Duncan Niederauer, chief exec of NYSE Euronext, told a panel here at Davos that rather than inventing a whole host of new regulations, we’d be better off focusing on existing means of bringing order to markets, specifically taking a page from the exchanges books by having central clearing and more price transparancy for derivatives and off-exchange structured products. I think he’s actually got a great point about clearing and better price information, but I can’t see this as being anywhere near bringing regulation up to scratch.

The response from others on the panel was similar.

Nourial Roubini of NYU – “The ideology of the last decade was self-regulation which means no regulation. Reliance on ratings agencies with massive conflicts of interest.

“If we don’t want a backlash against trade we have to have prudential regulation of the financial system.”

Obama economic advisor Laura Tyson -

“We need regulation, we’ve tried self regulation and it doesn’t work. Psychology tells us that in a highly competitive game the insensitivity to risk grows. It’s like a drug addiction problem. They got so much pleasure that they simply stopped paying attention to the risk.”

At the end of the panel they held a vote on Niederauer’s idea and it won 71 percent to 29. Whether that was a vote for the sensible parts of his idea or for making that the whole of the regulatory effort I leave you to decide.

James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The ideas expressed are his own.

So what is Blackstone Group chairman Stephen Schwarzman’s prescription for solving the banking crisis?

More leverage and less transparency, apparently.

Schwarzman told a panel at Davos that you can’t mandate higher levels of bank capital at the same time losses are mounting and that mark-to-market accounting needed to be changed.

“You need lower capital. Do something with fair value accounting which is exacerbating things . . . We have to add more leverage to the system.” He further took issue with what he described as a “fixation on transparency” and said “We have to use regulators to schedule out losses.” By that I presume he means keep the bank on life support until they can make enough to absorb their losses. It did work in the 1990s with some prominent U.S. banks, but…

Laura Tyson, an economic advisor to the Obama administration, didn’t seem to be buying in to the more leverage less disclosure meme.

“Nobody trusts the private system, why should they trust them?” she said. She also mentioned the Swedish solution, which you may remember imposed some pretty tough conditions on bank shareholders. She said that voters would be watching who made money out of bailouts and would be concerned by “compensation and dividends.”