4.9 SYSTEMIC RISK
Looking beyond the financial crisis to improved regulation, US federal agencies need to think
about what is needed to avoid a similar scenario occurring in the future. As identified by Lord
Turner, the major failure, shared by bankers, regulators, central banks, finance ministers and
academics across the world, was the failure to identify that the whole system was fraught
with market-wide, systemic risk (Turner 2009). The key problem was not that the supervision
of individual banks was insufficient, but that the regulator failed to see the wood for the
trees. They failed to piece together the jigsaw puzzle of a large US current account deficit,
rapid credit extension and house price rises and the purchase of mortgage-backed securities
by US institutions performing a new form of maturity transformation.27 Regulators, not only
in the US, failed to realise that there was an increase in total system risk to which financial
regulators, overall authorities, central banks and fiscal authorities needed to respond. To their
detriment regulators had been too preoccupied with institution-by-institution supervision of
idiosyncratic risk28 rather looking at the broad horizon.