Haldane reviewed what was known about banks that had gone bankrupt in the crisis, and how safe they had looked earlier according to the various sophisticated criteria laid out in Basel II and Basel III. He compared those numbers to the crudest possible measure of risk: had the bank borrowed a lot of money? At an annual convocation of central bankers at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Haldane presented his conclusions: every single way you sliced the data, the highly rational, hyper-quantified risk management methods were less effective than a crude rule of thumb: ‘Beware indebted banks.’ Perhaps Basel
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