A purveyor of fortune-cookie wisdom once wrote: “Things in life should be simple, not complicated.” Global regulators seem to agree, moving to purge the system of egregious complexity deemed to have sparked the financial crisis. Take the Basel committee – hardly a producer of easy-to-understand edicts itself. Last month, it agreed to raise drastically the capital banks must hold against “resecuritisation exposures”, such as collateralised debt obligations of asset-backed securities. By raising risk weightings, the changes will discourage banks from structuring or holding these complicated nasties, where the securitisation of a previous securitisation can make risks unintelligible.