RBS and the regulator

Just to confirm John Redwood's point that financial services in UK have suffered from too much over-sophisticated regulation, especially from Europe, which completely missed its target...

Reading through the RBS Annual Report 2007, as you do, I find the following under the heading of Credit Risk:

RBS has received agreement (called ‘a waiver’) from the UK Financial Services Authority to adopt the Advanced Internal Ratings Based (AIRB) approach for calculating capital requirements for the majority of the business with effect from 1 January 2008. The Group, therefore, will be one of a small number of banks whose risk systems and approaches have achieved the advanced standard for credit, the most sophisticated available under the new Basel II framework.

Case closed.