The price of trust: tackling the risks of ring-fencing

Learning the wrong lesson from Lehman? Ring-fencing hikes risk of bank failure, says Credit Suisse’s Wilson Ervin – he proposes an alternative

Trust was another casualty of the financial crisis. The crash-landing failures of Fortis and Lehman Brothers imposed surprise losses on many, including host countries of the firms’ entities around the world. This shattered the implicit assumption that large banks would be handled smoothly by their home regulators – a belief that had held up reasonably well for decades. Banks were now said to be “international in life, but national in death”.

In response, many jurisdictions adopted stringent con