Lazard’s Gary Parr Sees ‘Darwinian’ Pressure on Banks to Shrink
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Banks will be forced to cut back the number of businesses in which they operate in the next three years as new regulations make the universal model untenable, according to Gary Parr, vice chairman of Lazard Ltd.
“In 18 to 36 months, there will be a much more intense pressure on some number of banks to break up,” Parr said in an interview with Tom Keene on Bloomberg TV at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Thursday. “It’s a Darwinian exercise, and what’s fascinating to me is how slowly it’s going. It seems obvious with regulators increasing the capital requirements, with the burden of regulation, with the charges particularly for systemically important institutions.”