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To add to the mix, the Basel III rules, which have been accepted by both bank critics and bankers, will not come into effect until 2019. That sense of dissatisfaction about the state of banks and the attempts to regulate them burst through during the Davos global finance panel. Min Zhu, the deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, said the banking industry was "still too big" compared to the size of the global economy. Min also warned that other financial organizations, such as hedge funds, are playing a too-large, too-little regulated role known as "shadow banking" where risky practices that could cause a crisis remain beyond a regulator's reach. "All the debate going on, and the financial sector has not changed very much. We're not safer yet. Five years on, we are still debating whether we have too much or too little regulation," he said. "I would say the financial sector has a long way to go." Axel Weber, chairman of Swiss bank UBS and former head of Germany's central bank, added that global regulators "have clearly made up their minds that banks are too big." Dimon complained about "huge misinformation" about the risks posed by banks and that regulators were casting their net too wide, with too many agencies involved. "We're trying to do too much too fast," he said. "Everyone thinks it was one thing that sank the system." One skeptic of capital requirements is Edward J. Kane, a professor of finance at Boston College. He believes that big banks would likely find a way to circumvent them, as they did before the crisis by moving risk to off-balance sheet entities, for example
-- and still had the power to shape regulation in their interests. "We were told before the crisis that capital requirements on banks would be the medicine that would prevent us from having crises, but they failed," he told The Associated Press. A better way to discourage excessive risk-taking, Kane proposes, would be to charge banks a simple premium that reflects what the taxpayer would have to pay in case the bank needs to be bailed out. "There will always be financial crises," he said. "Regulators are always outgunned, outcoached and playing from behind. What we can try to do is control the incentives and make the crises less deep."
[Associated
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