David Chaplin: Everything you know about regulation is wrong

Jane Diplock. Photo / Martin Sykes

Opinion

I saw the best paradigms of my generation destroyed by madness, Jane Diplock didn't title her speech last week to the International Organisation of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) conference in Montreal.

Instead, Diplock, who heads IOSCO as well as New Zealand's own soon-to-be-restructured Securities Commission, opted for Time for a paradigm shift in thinking. I went ahead and read it anyway.

In her talk Diplock gets to grip with the big-picture, philosophical issues regulators are dealing with in the post global financial crisis world

"This crisis shocked investors, policy makers and regulators and has occasioned the necessity to completely rethink the way in which we understand markets, economic policy and securities regulatory policy," she blabbed to her fellow regulators.

"The crisis does not allow us to continue in the same paradigm of thinking which clearly let us down in the decade before the crisis."

While this couldn't be classed as an apology, it is an admission that financial regulators were a paradigm or two behind real life - everything they knew about regulation was wrong.

However, Diplock has some interesting ideas about how to pimp up the paradigm, looking for inspiration in Facebook and the work of cultural theorists who bang on about 'narrative' and 'metaphor', as in: "The new narrative we need to create needs to encapsulate new metaphors to assist our understanding."

And just as Diplock was working on the global narrative, in New Zealand the plot thickened. Last week the parliamentary Commerce Committee announced changes to the Financial Service Providers PreImplementation bill that will rewrite the regulation of the financial advisory industry one more time.

There have been so many twists in this storyline that it's difficult to remember who's who, what's what and, more importantly, why.


David Chaplin