Impact assessment signals Twin Peaks act can be next state-induced calamity
Document fails to show why existing system is incapable of providing the same outcomes after financial crisis, writes Robert W Vivian
The Treasury recently released its socioeconomic impact assessment, a kind of cost-benefit analysis, of the Financial Sector Regulation Bill — the so-called "Twin Peaks" bill currently before Parliament. The Cabinet and MPs should reject this half-baked attempt outright and insist that it be returned whence it came, before SA has another self-imposed calamity visited upon it. Instead, the financial advisers’ act has acquired an enormously expensive life all of its own. It now imposes direct deadweight costs on consumers conservatively estimated to be at least R600m a year, to say nothing of the much greater indirect costs they must now bear. The central purpose of the Twin Peaks bill is to rearrange the structure or architecture of SA’s financial services regulation. It plans to split the existing single, cohesive, unfragmented, uncomplicated, easily understood regulatory system into two separate regulators or "peaks". Each regulator will not only be inscrutably intertwined with the...
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