Regulation Of Risk

In the 1960s and 1970s, Congress enacted a vast body of legislation to protect the environment and individual health and safety. Collectively, this legislation is known as “risk regulation” because it addresses the risk of harm that technology creates for individuals and the environment. In the last two decades, this legislation has come under increasing attack by critics who employ utilitarian philosophy and cost-benefit analysis. The defenders of this body of risk regulation, by contrast, have lacked a similar unifying theory. In this book, the authors propose that the American tradition of philosophical pragmatism fills this vacuum. They argue that pragmatism offers a better method for conceiving of and implementing risk regulation than the economic paradigm favored by its critics. While pragmatism offers a methodology in support of risk regulation as it was originally conceived, it also offers a perspective from which this legislation can be held up to critical appraisal. The authors employ pragmatism to support risk regulation, but pragmatism also leads them to agree with some of the criticisms against it, and even to level new criticisms of their own. In the end, the authors reject the picture—painted by risk regulation’s critics—of widely excessive and irrational regulation, but the pragmatic perspective also leads them to propose a number of recommendations for useful reforms to risk regulation.

First Published in 2010. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This publication presents recent OECD papers on risk and regulatory policy. They offer measures for developing, or improving, coherent risk governance policies.

This book provides an easy, but comprehensive and rigorous access to the main concepts, terminology, methods and procedures of risk analysis intended for all those involved in the EU policy and regulatory decision making on risks. It establishes a common ground of knowledge which enables a more informed dialogue on risks, a closer collaboration between decision makers and scientists and a better appraisal of the potential and limits of risk science. The book also brings together in an accessible way much multidisciplinary knowledge which had been dispersed over many technical documents and specialist books. The EU is in the front line of health, safety and environmental risk management. GMOs, food safety, hazardous chemicals, climate change, radiation hazards, are just a few of the popular risk issues addressed by the EU through policy and regulatory measures. The risk analysis paradigm, including risk assessment, management and communication has been at the core of the EU decision making for a long time already. EU Institutions strive for a science-based approach to risk management. Nevertheless, the dialogue and collaboration on risk issues between policy makers, stakeholders and scientists are still difficult and the potential and limits of science in support of decision making, as well as the basic concepts of risk analysis are not fully understood outside the narrow specialist circles.

Bank Regulation, Risk Management, and Compliance is a concise yet comprehensive treatment of the primary areas of US banking regulation – micro-prudential, macroprudential, financial consumer protection, and AML/CFT regulation – and their associated risk management and compliance systems. The book’s focus is the US, but its prolific use of standards published by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and frequent comparisons with UK and EU versions of US regulation offer a broad perspective on global bank regulation and expectations for internal governance. The book establishes a conceptual framework that helps readers to understand bank regulators’ expectations for the risk management and compliance functions. Informed by the author’s experience at a major credit rating agency in helping to design and implement a ratings compliance system, it explains how the banking business model, through credit extension and credit intermediation, creates the principal risks that regulation is designed to mitigate: credit, interest rate, market, and operational risk, and, more broadly, systemic risk. The book covers, in a single volume, the four areas of bank regulation and supervision and the associated regulatory expectations and firms’ governance systems. Readers desiring to study the subject in a unified manner have needed to separately consult specialized treatments of their areas of interest, resulting in a fragmented grasp of the subject matter. Banking regulation has a cohesive unity due in large part to national authorities’ agreement to follow global standards and to the homogenizing effects of the integrated global financial markets. The book is designed for legal, risk, and compliance banking professionals; students in law, business, and other finance-related graduate programs; and finance professionals generally who want a reference book on bank regulation, risk management, and compliance. It can serve both as a primer for entry-level finance professionals and as a reference guide for seasoned risk and compliance officials, senior management, and regulators and other policymakers. Although the book’s focus is bank regulation, its coverage of corporate governance, risk management, compliance, and management of conflicts of interest in financial institutions has broad application in other financial services sectors. Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

The evolution of risk management has resulted from the interplay of financial crises, risk management practices, and regulatory actions. In the 1970s, research lay the intellectual foundations for the risk management practices that were systematically implemented in the 1980s as bond trading revolutionized Wall Street. Quants developed dynamic hedging, Value-at-Risk, and credit risk models based on the insights of financial economics. In parallel, the Basel I framework created a level playing field among banks across countries. Following the 1987 stock market crash, the near failure of Salomon Brothers, and the failure of Drexel Burnham Lambert, in 1996 the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision published the Market Risk Amendment to the Basel I Capital Accord; the amendment went into effect in 1998. It led to a migration of bank risk management practices toward market risk regulations. The framework was further developed in the Basel II Accord, which, however, from the very beginning, was labeled as being procyclical due to the reliance of capital requirements on contemporaneous volatility estimates. Indeed, the failure to measure and manage risk adequately can be viewed as a key contributor to the 2008 global financial crisis. Subsequent innovations in risk management practices have been dominated by regulatory innovations, including capital and liquidity stress testing, macroprudential surcharges, resolution regimes, and countercyclical capital requirements.

The regulation of risk is a preoccupation of contemporary global society and an increasingly important part of international law in areas ranging from environmental protection to international trade. This book examines a key aspect of international risk regulation - the way in which science and technical expertise are used in reaching decisions about how to assess and manage global risks. An interdisciplinary analysis is employed to illuminate how science has been used in international legal processes and global institutions such as the World Trade Organization. Case studies of risk regulation in international law are drawn from diverse fields including environmental treaty law, international trade law, food safety regulation and standard-setting, biosafety and chemicals regulation. The book also addresses the important question of the most appropriate balance between science and non-scientific inputs in different areas of international risk regulation.

Why are vast sums spent on controlling some risks but not others? Is there any logic to the techniques we use in risk regulation? These key questions are explored as this text exposes the components of risk regulation systems.