Professor William Black:

It was adopted on a bipartisan basis by conservatives, liberals and moderates. It is interesting that what was absolutely centrist in banking for half a century has now become "radical". The race to the bottom is another key example of a Gresham's dynamic. The regulatory race to the bottom was a real thing. If the members of the committee look at their counterparts in the United Kingdom - the parliamentary inquiries there - they will see it was absolutely explicit in the regulatory statute of the UK Financial Services Authority at that time that there was a need to win the competition. The aim was to keep the City of London as a top centre by deliberately weakening regulation.