The day started with a working breakfast (horrors!) looking at what is required to reregulate the world's banking system. While listening to a very informed discussion, I was briefly able to understand the complexities of what the regulators are looking to achieve, and how they want to make the new rules reflect a more economically useful style of banking.
It is impressive how much background thought is going into the process of what any new regulations are designed to achieve. A simple return to tighter management of lending is not what is happening, and it was fascinating to see how the regulators are working hard to incorporate the views of politicians and society, as well as the banking industry, as they talk at both a national level, and then internationally at the Financial Security Board, Basel, and the IMF.
The moral balance
The day ended with a dinner focused on how to redesign the global architecture with strong values to meet the new challenges of the multi-polar world. This possibly over-worthy discussion was brought back to reality by a Catholic archbishop from the Republic of Ireland, who told a story of a moral conundrum he faced when he was a teenage boy.
The book, Lady Chatterly's Lover, had just been published in Britain after a court case established that the story of a married woman's affair with a gamekeeper was not pornographic. However, the Irish courts did not agree and the book was banned in the Republic of Ireland, so when the teenage future-clergyman went on a school trip to Belfast in Northern Ireland, the first thing he did was to go to the shops to find a copy of the book. However, having got it in his hands, he faced the embarrassment of taking this shocking book to the counter and admitting to the sales assistant that he wanted to buy it. He found himself unable to do this, but he still wanted to read the book, so he solved the problem by stealing it.
