Protesters were handing out leaflets in the streets of Davos at the weekend. But their anger was not directed against world poverty, nuclear power or war; instead they were demanding that banks should put their derivatives business on to exchanges to make the financial system more transparent.
It is a potent reminder of how issues about financial stability dominated the agenda at the World Economic Forum last week. For most of the past decade, banks have used the WEF in Davos as a lavish opportunity to entertain clients. Last week they were fighting to fend off a wave of controls on sectors ranging from bonuses to proprietary trading and derivatives.
International supervisors, led by the Financial Stability Board and the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, are pondering how and when they should change the levels of capital and liquidity that banks will have to hold in future. Moreover, in recent weeks, politicians – Barack Obama, the US president, Alistair Darling, the UK chancellor, and Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president – have weighed in with measures, short-circuiting the more consultative regulatory response.