Suppose that banks are short of capital because of bad asset selection and heavy losses, and that there is a risk of deposits not being covered by banks' remaining assets-the situation allegedly facing Britain's banks and economy in late 2008. Surely everyone ought to agree that, ideally, the job of replenishing banks' capital should fall on the private sector, not the state, and that as far as possible accountability must lie in only one place. How might that be achieved? 

I propose a structure which is almost the polar opposite of Buiter's. In a 2009 monograph, Central Banking in a Free Society, I argued that the capital of the Bank of England should be provided by the leading banks, and that the functions of the central bank and deposit insurance agency should be amalgamated. Whereas Buiter wants, in effect, to nationalise the arrangements (and the costs) of cleaning up a banking system fiasco, I would privatise them. 

My proposal is much less radical than it may seem. Recall that at present the banking industry as a whole can in fact be levied by the FSCS if its funds are exhausted as a result of losses at one or a handful of banks. So, making the commercial banks the shareholders in the central bank and giving the central bank an explicit responsibility to protect deposits, has two consequences. First, the central bank would extend loans only if confident they would be repaid. The well-behaved, risk-avoiding and profitable banks have a strong interest in preventing their risk-prone competitors from incurring losses and ruining the system. Secondly, if the system nevertheless ran into trouble, the first line of defence would lie in the private sector, via the capital-levying power of the Bank of England. If the government did have to come in, it would be only after the bankers had decided that they could not help themselves. It would indeed be a last resort.