Hector Sants, the former chief executive of the Financial Services Authority, is joining Barclays bank.
Mr Sants will be in charge of hundreds of staff around the world and will report directly to Mr Jenkins.
Barclays chief executive Antony Jenkins said Mr Sants would ensure that all staff met the spirit and letter of the law and regulators' expectations.
In 2004 the Financial Services Authority responded by introducing a separate division for wholesale and institutional markets, headed by Hector Sants, previously an investment banker.
This will be seen as an admission by Mr Sants that the financial results currently published by banks don't tell the whole story about the risks they take.
But in a surprise move, Hector Sants, the current head of the FSA, will be made a deputy governor at the central bank and handed the new supervisory role.
His reply was pretty grumpy, especially when I told him that Mr Sants had said to me that banks like his were holding more cash than the regulator was insisting they had to do.
An early indication of the new boss's attitude came with his appointment last year of Hector Sants, former boss of the UK's banking watchdog, the Financial Service Authority, to head the Barclays' compliance department.
As the former boss of the UK's main financial regulator - which is now in the process of being split in two - Mr Sants should have the knowledge and credibility needed to restore Barclays reputation.
Mr Sants said that he and his colleagues are determined to make resolution procedures as effective as possible - and they are currently running simulations with the biggest banks to verify how resolution would operate in practice for them.
If, as Mr Sants implied, the new G-SIFI capital increment settles at around 3%, that will be significantly less than the optimal level calculated by David Miles of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee in an influential paper.
In September, the FSA revealed to MPs that as far back as 2010, Mr Sants had personally warned the then chairman of Barclays, Marcus Agius, that Bob Diamond might not be a suitable choice to become the bank's chief executive.
Mr Sants insisted however that he had not given up altogether on the importance of competition and market discipline in preventing banks from taking crazy risks - even though market discipline singularly failed in the run up to the financial crisis of 2007-8.
Funnily enough, earlier this week when I interviewed Hector Sants, the outgoing chief executive of the Financial Services Authority, he said the banks were indeed sitting on more cash than they need to do, rather than lending it, because of their fear of impending crisis.
However, they will be less pleased that Mr Sants makes clear that there is a price for them of winning that argument - which is that he and his colleagues at the PRA will be spending rather more time bossing them around, and circumscribing their activities, than they might like.
Mr Sants said it was "no secret" that the FSA and the Bank of England had been arguing on the international Basel Committee and the Financial Stability Board for a bigger increase in the capital held by G-SIFIs or the mega-banks than was desired by regulators from other countries, such as France and Germany.
Fourth, on the assumption that Lord Turner, the chairman of the FSA, becomes the new Deputy Governor for Financial Regulation (my sense is that the chief executive of the FSA, Hector Sants, is planning to leave the regulatory fray next year), we'd see the start of a compelling contest to succeed Mervyn King as Governor in 2013.
应用推荐