Why transparency isn’t always good for credit: Caveat lector column

Regulators pushing for transparency in all areas of the financial markets fail to understand the unique characteristics of credit

Visualising value-at-risk
Transparency and credit: uneasy bedfellows

In the regulators’ shed of holy cows, few are more highly prized than transparency. Yet what it really is and what value it brings market participants is not entirely certain. Let us not forget that even transparency can be as opaque as a bowl of porridge.

In the Jacobellis vs Ohio case held in the US Supreme Court in 1964 (which centred on whether the state of Ohio was right to ban French film Les Amants on grounds of obscenity), Justice Potter Stewart famously said of pornography: “I cannot

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