Robert Peston, who gets a bad press in some quarters, describes in some detail the “rampant deregulation” which we are told preceded the credit crunch:
As someone who has been a banking journalist at various times since the early 1980s I can speak with weary authority about the many years of intellectual toil invested by an elite financial priesthood of central bankers and regulators in devising complex rules on the capital that banks should hold.
These are known as the Basel Rules. And since the late 1980s, they have been the foundations of how banks operate: they determined how much banks could lend relative to their capital resources.
It’s generally a good post, about subordinated debt.