If bankers were quaking in their boots before the details of regulations intended to make their employers less likely to fail, they need not have worried.
The latest instructions from the financial regulator yesterday on how big banks must split, or ringfence, their high street lending from their risker operations are logical and in line with expectations, experts said.
Even the Prudential Regulation Authority’s insistence that banks will need between £2.2 billion and £3.3 billion in extra capital inside their low-risk lending businesses was less than feared.
The £3 billion is less than 1 per cent of their existing capital bases, analysts noted, and would in all likelihood be met by banks shifting capital from one part of their empire to another, rather than having