Europeans not impressed.

• Position: OFF THE NEWS - Brief article

It is no secret that former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Roger Ferguson, who served from 1997 to 2006, has been criticized for failing to sound the alarm in the period leading up to the outbreak of the U.S. subprime crisis. Ferguson had been Chairman Alan Greenspan's representative at the monthly meetings of global central bankers held in Basel, Switzerland, where the bank risk capital standards were coordinated. One reason for today's credit crisis is that those standards were skirted by the global banking community. The regulators were asleep at the switch.

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Today a number of European policy insiders question whether current Vice Chairman Donald Kohn is similarly detached from the realities of the financial markets. Since the August 2007 outbreak of the crisis, Kohn, they observe, appears to be relatively removed from the regulatory front lines. While Chairman Ben Bernanke and New York Federal Reserve President Timothy Geithner have engaged aggressively with foreign central bank and finance officials to communicate a stabilizing presence to global markets, Kohn appears to have...