British regulators identified Northern Rock as a weak link in Britain's banking system during planning exercises three years before the bank collapsed, the Financial Times reported on Saturday. The 2004 tests found that Northern Rock's business model was too reliant on wholesale borrowing rather than stable retail deposits for its home loans, the report said.
The flaws uncovered in the tests contradict suggestions that Northern Rock's collapse was impossible to predict, the FT said. The bank became the first British casualty of the global credit crunch in September 2007 when wholesale money markets froze, depriving it of much of its funding. It sought emergency support from the Bank of England before the government nationalised it in February 2008.
The FT report said regulators concluded they could not force lenders to change their business models, despite the results of the planning exercise, the newspaper said, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter.
One source familiar with the exercise told the paper that stringent curbs on lenders would have triggered protests that regulators were restricting banks' profitability. The risk simulation exercises were conducted by the Financial Services Authority, the Bank of England and the finance ministry. They were not immediately available to comment on the report.