The U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) clearly has no self-awareness. It wants to tackle “sludge.” Sludge is defined as practices that create excessive friction that hinders consumers from making decisions in their own interest. It has a consultation paper called “A new consumer duty,” which you can guess isn’t a “consumer duty” at all but meant to be a supplier duty to the consumer. This is ironic because the FCA is the ultimate creator of sludge not only for its customer, the finance industry, but thereby onwards for its customer’s customer, me and you.
Regulatory sludge is not a problem local to the U.K. but a canker that is stretching across jurisdictions. The sludge is being poured onto us to protect me and you from the “bad actors.” Remember the anti-money laundering (AML), know your customers (KYC) rules were installed initially to protect us from drug dealers. All that sending of recent gas-bills etc. was to stop the devastation of the bad actors in the drug trade from laundering their huge sums of ill-gotten cash.
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