Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

A decade after Thatcher’s Big Bang, with Britain’s native banking industry under intense competitive pressure, Tony Blair’s New Labour government set about further streamlining the City’s regulatory system.24 Nine specialist regulators were combined into a single agency, the Financial Services Authority (FSA). It set a new low bar for financial oversight. Tony Blair’s chancellor, Gordon Brown, boasted that the FSA offered “not only light but limited regulation.”25 The FSA was mandated to achieve its “goals in the most efficient and effective way.” “[N]ot damaging the competitive position of the United Kingdom” was its top priority.26 The FSA was required to apply cost benefit analysis to its own interventions and benchmark its operations against other countries.