The big meeting yesterday morning between global bankers and regulators is exactly the meeting I was hoping would happen. A large group of bold-face names such as Larry Summers, Brian Moynihan, Alistair Darling, and Mario Draghi, meeting behind closed doors, reportedly came to the obvious yet necessary conclusion that, in the words of Darling, “we are agreed that whatever we do, it needs to be universal. You’re dealing with a global banking system. You need a common approach across the world”. And some good news is slowly emerging: already regulators and banks seem to be coalescing around the need to create a wind-down fund which would allow the orderly resolution of insolvent banks.

It’s easy to say such things, of course: the difficulty is in the international coordination needed to enact them. At the panel on financial regulatory reform yesterday, everybody was at pains to say that every country is different and therefore needs its own custom-built regulatory regime: all we’re really talking about here is something called “regulatory consistency”, which, if the stars align correctly, might hopefully cut off most of the opportunities for banks to engage in regulatory arbitrage.