Chapter 3: Risks and Asymmetry

Perhaps it is easy to become fatalistically or pessimistically inclined and worried about the whole international evolution and effectiveness of regulation when one, for example, sees that from 1980 to around 2003 some 140 countries experienced significant banking sector problems, and that was around 75% of the IMF's membership over that spell. No good academic teacher of bank regulation will fail to include studies of bank crises from the past in any well-structured program on the subject. The list in the herein shown box is what students on one particular banking regulation program are asked to do research on, and the basis of class exercises is to get students to list out regulatory, or risk mismanagement, or general governance elements, in each failure.¹