Ambiguity of Basel Regulations' Impact on Bank as Institution of Public Trust

Contemporary banks are concerned as specially responsible for financial crisis. Common disappointment of their functioning comes especially from deeply grounded doctrine of special role, banks play in economy. It states, that independently from their purely commercial goals, banks should also be the entities of public trust. That role imposes special duties and obligations on banks, which were not always fulfilled for last years. The image of public trust is based on multidimensional safety structure. One of its pillars could be labelled as "forced trust" and is supported with the set of regulations. As a main institutional source of international banking regulations, the Basel Committee could be considered. Main regulations prepared with that body are known as Basel I, Basel II and Basel III. All of them made a great impact on the culture of banking risk management and invoked an awareness of various types of dangers banks are exposed to. At the same time however, it could be proved, that evidently positive impact of regulations is accompanied also by negative ones. In many cases banking regulations initiated such an unwanted phenomena as "regulatory arbitrage" or "negative selection". In a paper some aspects of that darker side of basel regulations are presented in chronological order