金融中心:纽约PK伦敦
2010-07-19 22:39:20
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金融中心:纽约PK伦敦


2010年04月09日 05:29 AM
Rules will decide the New York vs London battle
By John Plender


How is the financial crisis affecting the race for global pre-eminence between New York and London? The latest Global Financial Centres report from consultants Z/Yen Group showed that London had lost its lead over New York, leaving the twin sisters of global finance level-pegging.

Yet this is a marathon, not a sprint. In the longer run, the overall shape of regulation and tax, and more particularly the future handling of institutions that are too big or too interconnected to fail, will dictate the outcome. Here the picture is far from clear.

One reasonably safe bet is that a new Basel agreement, however onerous, will provide the basis for a level playing field on capital and liquidity. The unpredictability starts with unilateral measures, where the US is currently making the pace. While the Obama bank levy initially looked a potential shot in the foot for New York, it looks less so now that the political mood in the UK and continental Europe is moving to a more hostile stance on bank taxation. But it is hard to believe that the 1,336-page Dodd Bill on US financial reform – compare and contrast with the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act's 17 pages – will not give rise to the law of unintended consequences.

The more interesting question is whether the Obama Administration's support for Paul Volcker's plan to downsize large complex financial institutions will have an adverse impact on New York. In this, the US is going back to the 1930s regulatory approach of prohibition as opposed to taxation, whether by capital requirements or levies, in the attempt to address systemic risk.

It is too soon to know how this will play out. The lobbying power of the US banks is phenomenal and there are powerful corporate treasurers who argue that they need large complex banks to provide services to their own complex international organisations. But there must be a possibility that if Mr Volcker has his way some corporate banking business would leak to Europe if the full universal banking model survives there.

It seems highly unlikely that the French or Germans would abandon this model. In the UK, all three main political parties will no doubt compete as to who has the most bloodcurdling plan to hang, draw and quarter top bankers in the run-up to the election. Yet Alistair Darling, the chancellor, has shown no great enthusiasm for going the prohibition route.

If the Tories have sounded more aggressive, it remains an open question whether they would have the appetite to take on the banks given the continued employment-generating capacity of the financial sector and the lack of enthusiasm of many Tory members of parliament.

The whole rationale of prohibition could anyway become redundant if the Basel-based Financial Stability Board's working group on cross-border crisis management comes up with a sound resolution regime for large complex financial institutions. The FSB has sponsored work to develop recovery and resolution plans for the top 25 such institutions.

In a recent speech, Paul Tucker, Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, who heads the working party, said that resolution “could take its place alongside structure and regulation as one of the key elements of a reform package to strengthen the global financial system”.

Among the more interesting proposals under consideration is one to allow the authorities to impose haircuts on uninsured creditors in a going concern.

This would amount to compulsory recapitalisation and would cast the “too big to fail” issue in a different light. Yet the difficulty of achieving international agreement on such complex territory suggests that this is very much a long shot.

My suspicion is that the US will sustain some hard knocks from the politicians on the regulatory front, while in the UK it will be tax that does more damage. As Philip Booth of the Institute of Economic Affairs points out, the UK has the world's longest tax code, with the possible exception of India. Its recent rise in income tax and measures against non-domiciled folk has alienated much of the foreign business community in the UK. There is no surer way of pleasing the electorate, meantime, than taxing bankers.

Yet where the balance will fall between the two financial centres on all this is anyone's guess.

I doubt whether Frankfurt and Paris, ranked 13 and 20 respectively in the Z/Yen survey, will make big inroads into London's business.

More plausible is that Asian centres, where Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo are bunched closely together, will take market share from both New York and London.

The multi-trillion dollar question is whether winning this race will be anything more than a Pyrrhic victory. If there is no effective regulatory solution to the problem of systemic risk, that is all it will be.

2010年04月09日 05:29 AM
金融中心:纽约PK伦敦
作者:英国《金融时报》专栏作家 约翰?普伦德


金融危机对纽约与伦敦争夺全球卓越地位的竞赛影响如何?咨询公司Z/Yen Group发表的最新全球金融中心报告显示,伦敦已经失去了相对于纽约的领先优势,这对全球金融孪生姐妹目前不相上下。

不过,这是一场马拉松比赛,不是短跑。从较长期来看,监管与税收的总体格局,尤其是未来如何处理太大或互连程度太高而不能倒闭的机构,将决定比赛结果。从这个角度看,局面还非常不清晰。

一个相当保险的押注是,新巴塞尔协议(不管多么繁重),将会为两者在资本与流动性上的公平竞

 
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