Political pressure to cut banks down in size is “totally misguided”, Josef Ackermann, chief executive of Deutsche Bank and chairman of the Institute of International Finance, told a London conference on Monday, in an attack on regulatory thinking. Ackermann said that pressure on lenders to organise as a string of subsidiaries was “completely unacceptable” and would “effectively kill” the EU’s single banking market. However, Lord Turner, chairman of the UK’s FSA watchdog, told the same conference that multinational banks operating as a constellation of self-sufficient subsidiaries could qualify for lower capital requirements than those operating as fully integrated global groups.
