Mr. William Beausang:

I think ... you know it ... it's a contentious issue and obviously, I mean,you will talk to people who will hold that ... that kind of, the Basel ... you know, that in moving from Basel I to Basel II there was an ... you know, there was an improvement, in principle, in terms of the design and the regulatory system. But certainly and ... I mean, it comes across very strongly from the work that the UK commissioned on banking standards did, that they concluded that ... and this was in their report on the failure of HBOS, they say, and this is a parliamentary committee:

The requirements of the Basel II framework not only weakened controls on capital adequacy by allowing banks to calculate their own risk-weightings, but they ... distracted supervisors from concerns about liquidity and credit; they may also have contributed to the appalling supervisory neglect of asset quality.

So that's in a bigger country with a much better-resourced supervisory body and that's the conclusion they're coming to in terms of the impact of Basel II on the efficacy of financial supervision over that period and in relation to the different supervisory approach that it encouraged, where as I said, supervisors were encouraged to review the model not to review the risks.