When chief executives of banks start lining up to complain about something, regulators know they must be on the right track. The recent increase in whining is a response to the suggestions being made by regulators that they trust the complex risk-weighting approach used to set capital ratios under Basel III about as far as they can throw it.

Instead, there is a groundswell of regulatory support for the simpler leverage ratio - which expresses a bank's equity as a percentage of its total assets - to act as counterbalance to the more complex risk-weighted approach.