Training day

摘要

In 1856 Royal British Bank, a colossal fraud A described by this paper as "an extraordinary example of the little trouble the public take to think for themselves," collapsed. A wave of laws and banking regulations followed its demise. Among them was a bill in 1879 proposing the auditing of banks' accounts, which contained the radical idea of listing liabilities down one side of the page and assets on the other side. Another crisis, another set of proposals. On June 19th a committee of mps and peers delivered a report that aspires to change banking "for good". It runs considerably longer than the 1879 bill, at about 600 pages, and encompasses a wider range of remedies. Yet its efficacy in preventing future crises and bad behaviour by bankers will probably not be much greater than that of its predecessor.