Certain EU member countries want banks to foot the bill for plugging the budget deficit they helped to cause. But the resulting tax looks set to hit the real economy most of all.

The eurozone crisis has precipitated intense scrutiny of the sovereign credit rating process, but the sovereigns themselves are hardly impartial judges.

The desire of the US Federal Reserve to create more uniform supervision of foreign bank subsidiaries is understandable, but its proposals risk cutting across international efforts at regulatory coordination.

Swap execution facilities are supposed to be central to the efforts of the Dodd-Frank Act to make the derivatives industry safer, but delayed rule-making has thrown their very existence into doubt.

The European Parliament wants high-frequency traders to hold stocks for half a second before selling to prevent a future stock market crash, but critics retort that slowing down trading is not a solution to the problem.

Plans for a European banking union may address a perceived missing pillar of monetary union, but they are a very long-term project that threaten to cut across other measures to stabilise the system.

US regulators have extended the consultation over their proposed rules to implement the international Basel III capital requirements, as implementation fears mount up for smaller banks.

Hong Kong has seen a boom in initial public offerings in recent years, and now the country's Securities and Futures Commission is aiming to crack down on lax due diligence and introduce a stricter code of conduct for sponsoring banks.

The Financial Transaction Tax introduced by France in August is intended to deter speculative investor behaviour, but the execution looks likely to miss the target.

The US JOBS Act is intended to boost access to public equity markets for emerging growth companies. But it has yet to win the trust of investors.