Not just here

Not the most scientific study in the world, but it stands to reason:

Tighter financial regulation around the world is constraining bank lending to businesses, according to research published today by Allen & Overy LLP, which polled its regulatory and finance lawyers.

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s incoming rules and U.K. recommendations from the Independent Commission on Banking may “have much wider economic impacts” than the changes intend, including stifling credit, A&O said.

“Four years down the line following the crisis we are seeing huge amounts of regulation, thousands of pages, impacting banks,” Etay Katz, a regulatory partner at the London-based law firm, said in an interview today with Mark Barton on Bloomberg Television. “Despite international efforts to harmonize regulation, we see a lot of turf wars, incohesion, duplication, and more than anything uncertainty.”