The long-awaited Financial Services Authority’s report on the failure of the Royal Bank of Scotland, published three years after the bank’s collapse, is as critical of its own regulatory work as it is of RBS’s faulty management.

The value of hindsight is something of a mantra throughout the 452-page report, which lays out a number of areas where the FSA's "light touch" approach to regulation failed to adequately address issues of liquidity, capital and overall risk that would eventually cripple a number of financial institutions like RBS when the market soured.