I have not commented on this report.

It is always a cause for concern when the likes of PricewaterhouseCoopers can publish a comment like this:

PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP welcomes many parts of the Turner Report. We find it encouraging that Lord Turner appears determined to restore confidence in London as the leading global centre for financial services - a reputation which was built on financial stability and a sound regulatory regime.

or the CBI comments such as:

Adair Turner has come up with targeted proposals that deal with specific failings and risk to the system as a whole, rather than responding to the wilder calls for action against banks. His dispassionate, forensic approach has much to recommend it. A rush to legislation risked a repeat of a Sarbanes-Oxley type over-reaction, which would simply have compounded the effects of the recession.

Of course that’s not surprising. The references to offshore in the review are minimal. Recommendation 10 says:

10. Offshore financial centres should be covered by global agreements on regulatory standards.

This is amplified in this statement:

Global agreement on regulatory priorities should therefore include the principle that offshore centers must be brought within the ambit of internationally agreed financial regulation (whether relating to banking, insurance or any other financial sector).

It’s welcome, but what does it mean?

And Turner, a banker to the core shows how little he understands the reality of offshore when he says:

Equally, however, it is important to recognise that the role of offshore financial centers was not central in the origins of the current crisis. Some SIVs were registered in offshore locations; but regulation of banks could have required these to be brought on-balance sheet and captured within the ambit of group capital adequacy requirements. And many of the problems arose from the inadequate regulation of the trading activities of banks operating through onshore legal entities in major financial centres such as London or New York.

Tighter effective controls in offshore centers will, however, become more important over time as regulation is improved in the major onshore locations and as the incentives for regulatory arbitrage through movement offshore therefore increase.

He provides the exit route before the negotiations have ever begun.

There doesn’t seem much in here to suggest that the stranglehold banks create on regulation by suggesting they will leave whenever someone threatens to regulate them is being tackled. It looks like secrecy jurisdictions will remain the banks ‘get out of regulation free’ card.

It’s a step in the right direction.

But a very small one.