Francisco González, Chairman and CEO of BBVA, sees Europe as "a very addressable economic problem that has become a political problem that has been poorly addressed". With the current crisis, the phrase may seem curious, but I could not agree more. Financial regulation itself provides arguments.

A trivial example; a simple button from sample. When the RAE defined banker in the past, it alluded to "prudent man". It was indeed a profession that required such a virtue. Out of prudence, he reserved part of his capital in case fate played a trick on him. Despite the imprecision of the term, the long experience and the continuous vision allowed the prudent governor of the tribe to quantify these capital requirements and the sector to meet them.

With the invasion of overconsumption, the sector, with the governor's silence, financed without due guarantees, killing the adjective. Without prudence, and with the crisis already upon us, just in case became a big question mark and a point of suspicion: there was no history or authority to rely on to determine capital requirements. Nervous fellow governors opened the discussion on regulatory changes. Like doctors with suspected heart patients, Basel, in white coats, put the banker on a bicycle and stressed his heart to see how the new baseline scenario would affect him and thus estimate the sensitivity of capital models to the economic cycle.

They placed electrodes where they thought there was greater risk, among others, in cyclical adjustments (impact of the average default probabilities of the portfolio), procyclicality (capital consumption above the real worsening of conditions), concentration (fatness and default probability could be correlated), rating migration (deterioration of the credit quality of assets) or stochastic LGD. So far so good. The problem came when interpreting the results. Because the electrodes are in the experimental phase: they have not been tested on humans. There is still no homogeneous or unanimous methodological approach and choosing one or the other implies major impacts on risk parameters and capital requirements. Depending on how we set the scale, we can be in a coma or in trouble. A good study by Management Solutions sample shows how the options selected in the regulatory model imply capital consumptions that can reach 25%. With no human trials, no real authority, the ban, already opened with mortgages, has set its eyes on SME loans.

The moment reminds me of the fall of the Wall and the "westernization" of Eastern Europe, for which papers from Harvard offices were taken as reference letter . They were good papers, but they were so far removed from reality that they caused huge side effects, e.g., an escalation of corruption.

Reality has a bad habit of not allowing evidence. It is necessary to feel it and know it first. Stressed, full of electrodes, the Spanish patient wonders today how his health would be judged if the bicycle were German, French or American. Because let's not fool ourselves: they do not demand the same. Spanish bicycles are more demanding.

I join the trend that points out that these methodologies are penalizing the credit and economic recovery. We have Bankia, undoubtedly, but we also have entities that, with the bicycles of others, are in very good health. This is not an economic problem, but a political one.