Gestion des risques: quel rôle pour le droit?

La gestion du risque est à l'ordre du jour dans le contexte actuel. Un texte intéressant de Jacqueline Best hier dans le Report on Business intitulé Reaching the limits of risk management fournissait une dose de scepticisme bienvenue relativement à la science de la gestion des risques.

Dans son texte, elle nous rappelle qu'il est tentant actuellement d'avoir recours aux outils traditionnels:

Time after time in the current crisis, we're told that more transparency, better disclosure, and better risk management models are the answers to our current woes.

Cependant, le risque, de par sa nature fuyante, ne se soumet pas aisément à ces outils qui reposent sur le postulat que l'information permet de l'endiguer.

Even if it were possible to provide the markets with perfect information about the complex risks involved in some of these assets, would investors pay attention? There were plenty of warning signs about the current crisis that most investors ignored. The Bank for International Settlements has pointed out that the same thing happened before the Asian financial crisis: BIS warned of growing economic weakness, but the markets just didn't want to believe it.

This is not to argue that transparency and better risk management aren't important – they are. But they are sorely inadequate and potentially misleading in their promise of a quick and relatively painless fix.

The limits of risk management mean that we have to start making tough economic and political decisions. It means that we can't rely as much on industry self-regulation, on credit rating agencies' evaluations, or on the major banks' internal risk models. We can't rely as much on market discipline.

De là, elle estime que la réglementation est nécessaire. Mais quelle réglementation?

The consequence is that we need more regulation, at national and international levels. And since the limits of risk management pose real challenges for regulators as well as investors, we need more creative and flexible regulation. We need to create institutions that remember even at the peak of a market that what goes up tends to come down, working counter-cyclically to moderate the booms and troughs rather than intensifying them. We need a kind of regulation that leaves room for the unpredictable.

C'est ici que je demeure perplexe. Au-delà des généralités, à quoi réfère-t-elle vraiment? Après tout, les instruments d'intervention ne sont pas illimités: obligation de divulgation, interdictions d'opérations, règles sur la solvabilité, etc... Pour réfléchir de manière plus appliquée, je recommande les récents texte de Steven Shwarcz de Duke University (voir ici sur SSRN).