FSA's still on ball after 10 years

The FSA should be thought of as a goalkeeper, he said. It should not be condemned just because it conceded an occasional goal. What really mattered was its ability to pull off some pretty spectacular saves from time to time, and to make sure overall that it let fewer past than the chap at the other end. But he was also very aware how the system needed to be given time to bed down before people would come to appreciate its worth.

His fear was that there would be a major financial crisis in the first few years that would lead politicians to focus on the downside of the FSA's approach before they had time to appreciate its benefits. This in turn could lead to a collapse of trust and the subsequent imposition of much tougher and proscriptive legislation.

In the event, he got through that. Although he was there for the dot-com boom, the millennium bug and the subsequent bear market, the only major regulatory failure for which the FSA caught a lot of flak came some five years in, with the collapse of split-capital investment trusts, when he was accused in a typically theatrical moment in front of the Treasury Select Committee of being "asleep at the wheel".

This jibe ignored the fact regulation of investment trusts was not part of the FSA's mandate, so Davies had neither the power nor the responsibility to regulate split-capital trusts. But Hey - when did a detail like that ever stop a politician in search of a headline?

Arguably, therefore, the first real regulatory mess on the FSA's watch is the current one over Northern Rock and, embarrassing though it is, it is surely important in these fevered times to keep a sense of proportion. Messy though this one is, one goal against in a decade is not a bad scoresheet and that ought to count in its favour.

The FSA, under pressure from Government, has said it intends to introduce tougher rules for banks. However, one would imagine that it is already too late to save any of the current crop of banks that may be heading for the rocks because their course for disaster has been irredeemably set by their loose lending in the past few years. Nor do the people in those organisations trying to save their ships need regulation to tell them what is necessary.

We should also have learned by now that regulation passed in haste as a reaction to one crisis rarely proves of any use in preventing the next one.

Proportionate risk-based regulation is a key attraction of the City compared with rival financial centres. It has taken a knock but that is all the more reason not to lose sight of the importance of this principle. Whatever changes have to be made must not be at the expense of the core philosophy.

RATHER like Nick Ferguson's thoughts about tax paid by private-equity barons and cleaning ladies, remarks by Tesco's Tim Mason about being too old at 50 for the chief executive's job at the retailer have been taken out of context to support arguments which were probably never the author's intention.

Mason probably did say that he was too old at 50 to become a chief executive, but the point he was making was that he and current Tesco boss Sir Terry Leahy are only a year apart in age. herefore, when it is time for Leahy to retire, Mason will also be close to retirement.

In the context of Tesco, the barrier is his age relative to Terry Leahy, not his age in absolute terms.

Even if this point has been lost on many, it will not have been lost on headhunters who, if they had not had Mason in their sights earlier, must surely now put him on their shortlists in future - if only to demonstrate to their clients that they have been paying attention.

But even if that comes to nothing, Mason and those of a similar age and talent have little need to worry. One of the unremarked challenges to British business life in the next few years is that the downsizing and de-layering of business in the past decade has hugely depleted the numbers of middle managers from which the next cadre of leaders should be drawn, so there is a much-reduced pool of talent.

Another is that the postwar baby boomers will soon move into retirement. When they go, it will cause a huge number of vacancies just at the point at which the supply of candidates is curtailed. There will therefore be more than enough jobs for over 50s such as Mason, and for many others less talented.