Financial Regulation International
Northern Rock: systemic, liquidity and credit risks – lessons for risk-based regulation?
Joanna Gray, University of Newcastle
Introduction
It is true that there has been a devastating loss of shareholder value in Northern Rock plc in September 2007, and, arguably,
of wider confidence in modern financial capitalism and the ability of legal and government institutions to maintain that confidence
through their techniques of regulatory design, market interventions and political leadership. However, Northern Rock remains
solvent, the immediate losses are borne by the bank’s owners (who, in due course, will be likely to seek to shift them to
the managers through litigation against Board members), depositors have not lost money and, thanks to the Government’s guarantee
of taxpayer support for 100% of Northern Rock deposits, even if the bank were not to find a buyer and were to collapse, would
still lose nothing. In addition, the history of past bank runs points to any wider loss of systemic confidence as being temporary
and, indeed, as providing opportunities for wider policy learning and improvement. It may, then, seem strange to use the example
of the legal action for damages against the Bank of England to cover depositor losses suffered in the collapse in 1991 of
the BCCI banking group as a cautionary note of what can happen if the limits to financial regulation’s ability to deliver
a zero-failure, uncertainty-free world are not properly understood. That litigation ground through the civil court system
for 13 years before it was abandoned in late 2005 and set records for lawyers’ prolixity, delays and costs. In the eyes of
the trial judge it threatened to bring the whole legal system into disrepute,
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and just over a year ago it was the governor of the Bank of England who was doing the criticising when he said: