Banking crises inevitably bring forth more and different regulation of banks, and the global crisis from mid-2007 to early 2009 was no exception as the aftermath of the crisis witnessed one of the biggest-ever upheavals in international banking regulation. The regulatory pendulum has had a long history, as bank regulation has varied in ambition and complexity over many decades. This article is intended to question whether the new regulatory regime for banks implies disproportionate and excessively complex regulation, with attendant and unnecessary private and social costs. We identify several pressures tending towards over-regulation. In particular, as regulation has a cost, but no price, it may falsely be viewed as a “free good” with a consequent tendency for it to be both over-demanded and over-supplied by risk-averse regulators. Whilst each addition to regulation taken alone might seem to satisfy cost–benefit criteria, a large number of apparently desirable regulations may mean that the totality of regulation becomes disproportionate for the key regulatory objectives. Cost–benefit analysis should, therefore, also be applied to the totality of regulation. Historically, the focus of regulatory regimes has been on reducing the probability of bank failures (with a tendency for rules escalation) rather than minimising the costs of those failures that do occur. There can be a trade-off between the two in that the lower are the costs of bank failure (via, for instance, strong resolution arrangements) the less need there could be for regulation to lower the probability of bank failures. The debate needs to be about the appropriate weight to be given to these two important dimensions of the regulatory regime.

银行业危机不可避免地带来更多不同的银行监管，2007 年年中至 2009 年初的全球危机也不例外，因为危机的余波见证了国际银行业监管史上最大的动荡之一。监管钟摆的历史由来已久，因为几十年来银行监管的雄心和复杂程度各不相同。本文旨在质疑新的银行监管制度是否意味着不成比例和过于复杂的监管，以及随之而来的和不必要的私人和社会成本。我们发现了一些趋向于过度监管的压力。特别是，由于监管是有成本的，但没有价格，它可能被错误地视为“免费商品”，从而导致规避风险的监管机构对它的过度需求和过度供给的趋势。虽然单独对监管的每一项补充似乎都满足了成本效益标准，但大量显然合意的监管可能意味着监管的整体与关键监管目标不成比例。因此，成本效益分析也应该应用于整个监管。从历史上看，监管制度的重点一直是降低银行倒闭的可能性（有规则升级的趋势），而不是尽量减少那些确实发生的倒闭的成本。两者之间可以进行权衡，因为银行倒闭的成本越低（例如通过强有力的解决安排），就越不需要通过监管来降低银行倒闭的可能性。