Comment, analysis and other offerings from Thursday’s FT,
Smaller banks will not make us safer
Josef Ackermann, chief executive of Deutsche Bank, writes: A number of regulatory changes will lead to higher capital requirements, and care should be taken that the aggregate effect does not exceed levels deemed sufficient in the interest of an appropriate balance between stability and the ability of the financial system to raise the funds necessary for global growth.
David Pilling: Washington risks taking China too seriously
What a difference an “and” makes. The US-China Strategic Economic Dialogue (SED), a twice-yearly bilateral encounter centred on economic issues, has morphed under President Barack Obama into the broader Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED).
Chatter about a new global currency is overblown
Robert Pozen?, chair of MFS Investment Management, writes: SDRs are not a realistic alternative to US dollars as the global reserve currency because there are too few of them in circulation. For the same reason, swaps of US dollars for SDRs would have limited utility.
How to take charge of a two-speed stimulus
Felix Rohatyn and Everett Ehrlich, former chairman of New York’s Municipal Assistance Corporation and president of ESC Company, an economic consulting firm, respectively, write: The conventional wisdom both in Washington and on Wall Street is that the stimulus package passed last spring has been slow to feed through into spending, leaving the economy to founder in the interim. But the reality is more complex.
Editorial comment: Commodities and regulatory fetishes
Only last summer, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission brushed off worries about speculators in energy markets like a lazy bovine would a cloud of flies. An altogether different beast appeared in this week’s hearings on how to curb speculation, called by its new chairman Gary Gensler.
Lex on Microsoft/Yahoo
Microsoft at least gets the scale that helps its Bing become more competitive against Google, giving it a chance to improve the online business that has been a 10-year money pit.
Insight: Learn to love the recovery
Tim Bond, head of asset allocation at Barclays Capital, writes: Never has a bull market climbed a steeper wall of worry. In spite of a proliferation of positive economic indicators, the consensus remains gloomy. Bullish economists are rarer than hens’ teeth.