A former top US financial regulator is calling for less global regulation, saying that the financial industry is suffering from an “orgy of rule writing”.Former Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman, Richard Breeden, told guests at the BMA Regulatory Forum yesterday that imposing global financial standards is “misguided” and provides a foundation for some of the largest banking issues.“The effort to impose uniformity with regulation on a diverse world is misguided, doesn’t work and really lies a base for some of the worst problems we have in the market,” he told a packed house at the Fairmont Hamilton Princess. “We have suffered from orgies of regulation rule writing. It’s a lot easier to write rules if you aren’t responsible for the nasty business of actually carrying out an inspection.”He added that if rules are created that are perceived by businesses as too complex, it will “incentivise more efforts by companies to get around those rules”.Mr Breeden boasts a lengthy resume, which includes having been a director of more than a dozen US and European companies, and was appointed the chairman of the SEC from 1989 to 1993.During his time with the SEC, Mr Breeden designed and restructured the savings and loan industry which held more than $1 trillion in insured deposits, created the SEC’s international division and helped to pioneer global audit and disclosure standards.Since 2005 he has been the chairman and CEO of Breeden Capital Management LLC, the manager of a series of affiliated investment funds. He has also served since 1996 as chairman of Richard C Breeden & Co, LLC, a professional services firm specialising in strategic consulting, financial restructuring and corporate governance advisory services.Mr Breeden feels that the growing trend of global standardisation of rules, which would include the Basel Committee and, some would argue the Solvency II regime, is not working the way it was intended.“Financial regulation has become one of the biggest areas of government but I’m sad to say that it’s not one of the best areas of government,” he said.“We’re doing all this new work, putting out all these new standards, you’d like to think that it translates into that people are actually safer. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. That’s our challenge to figure out why that is and doing something about it.”Mr Breeden guessed that expenditures in the US on regulating and direct/indirect support of the financial regulatory system is up at least a hundredfold since his time in government.“The SEC spends today ten times what it did every year when I was the chairman,” he said. “We need to do a lot better in making regulation effective not just making it big.”He added, however, that global cooperation in regulation has been an “immensely” positive and constructive force.Mr Breeden recommended finding the world’s experts in particular areas and getting them to lay out best practices on the table, rather than having large commissions filled with people who might not have the ‘on-the-ground’ expertise.“If you are not responsible for inspecting and enforcing rules, you shouldn’t be allowed to write them,” he said.During his time at the SEC, the agency signed more than 20 bilateral agreements with countries regarding enforcement cooperation and technical assistance.But Mr Breeden said that the underlying principle of that cooperation was volunteerism: where regulation was not forced upon everyone.“Every national regulator decided for themselves which standards they wanted to use, which standards they wanted to modify and which they wanted to ignore and that was fine for us,” he said. “Reducing differences pays dividends over and over again but in the end you can’t eliminate all the differences among our disparate economies.”He added that global harmonisation is needed but it shouldn’t be carried so far that critical local differences are ignored.