After the global financial crisis, bank regulation became more stringent, and as a result the traditional banking system was well capitalized leading into the COVID-19 pandemic. But these same regulatory changes also incentivized a continuing migration of traditional banking activities to nonbank financial institutions (NBFIs), where looser regulation allowed for dangerous buildups of systemic risk. These risks were then realized across many NBFIs and markets in 2020. While legislation to harmonize regulation across these different domains would be desirable, we do not believe it likely in the foreseeable future. In this paper we propose a congruence principle for financial regulation, whereby regulators use existing statutory authority to coordinate rules across economically similar instruments. We provide examples of how such congruence could work for the cases of nonprime mortgage finance and the markets for US Treasury securities.

全球金融危机之后，银行监管变得更加严格，因此传统银行系统资本充足，导致 COVID-19 大流行。但这些相同的监管变化也激励了传统银行活动向非银行金融机构 (NBFI) 的持续迁移，在这些机构中，更宽松的监管允许系统性风险的危险累积。2020 年，许多 NBFI 和市场都意识到了这些风险。虽然需要立法来协调这些不同领域的监管，但我们认为在可预见的未来不太可能。在本文中，我们提出了金融监管的一致性原则，监管者利用现有的法定权力来协调经济上相似的工具的规则。