FSA

- This week’s Economist sees Lexington bemoan those advancing the discourse of American exceptionalism, suggesting that “[t]he last thing the country needs is to be distracted from its practical problems by the quest for an elusive greatness”. Elsewhere, The Spectator’s Coffee House blog remembers Jimmy Carter’s fabled 1979 speech in which he spoke of a US “crisis of confidence”.

Talk given by David Steven at Gresham College on Time to Stop Betting the House, as part of a Long Finance Roundtable meeting (March 2010)
Download Speech

Shock news that Hector Sants, chief executive of the FSA, has resigned. Though, I am sure the two events are not causally related – let me again plug my paper, published last week by the Long Finance Foundation, on risk in the UK mortgage market, which was was highly critical of the FSA’s response to the housing bubble.

Today, I launch a new paper on risk and resilience in the UK housing market. The report calls for a fundamental shift in the way in which the UK mortgage market is regulated and the how it operates.
The paper is published by the Long Finance Foundation, which is a counter to the short-termism that has brought many first world economies to the brink of penury.