“When I was a bank supervisor,” Peter Cooke said, “my recurring nightmare was a mega international conference hotel at which a whole fleet of stretch limos was drawing up to the entrance, disgorging their cargoes of prosperous bankers. On the back of each limo was an identical bumper sticker: ‘Two million lemmings can’t be wrong.’ ”
Cooke was at the heart of two of the world’s key financial organisations, the Bank of England and the Bank for International Settlements, in the 1980s when the global money system was undergoing dramatic change.
His greatest achievement was to win agreement for the first attempt to save the lemmings from themselves. Until 1988, governments set their own levels of capital backing for their banks: the lower the required