Soft-touch regulation

摘要

Like Agatha Christie's "Murder on the Orient Express", a whodunnit in which clues implicate all the main suspects, investigations into the sad tale of Northern Rock are turning up so many potential culprits that no one of them, it seems, can be held responsible for Britain's first bank run in more than a century. On October 9th lawmakers quizzed Sir Callum McCarthy and Hector Sants, the bosses of the Financial Services Authority (fsa), Britain's financial regulator and supervisor of its banks. With public money underpinning Northern Rock, parliamentarians wanted to know who had let the bank get into such a sorry state, and who managed its bungled rescue.