Financial services regulators in the US, UK and Hong Kong have more than doubled their expenditure over the last seven years according to a quick report-reading exercise by Kinetic Partners. The advisory firm has not, however, discovered the reasons for this. The crash of 2008 obviously must have helped, as must the high inflation that the world's governments have caused by debasing their currencies throughout the period.

Kinetic Partners’ reasearch, presumably based on a reading of annual reports, found that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the UK's Financial Conduct Authority, and before it the Financial Services Authority (FSA/FCA) and the Securities and Futures Commission of Hong Kong (SFC) had a combined expenditure of approximately $25.7 billion in 2012/13. This was more than double the total expenditure before the financial crisis in 2006/07 of nearly $12 billion. Hardly surprisingly, the Kinetic figures show that increases in staff numbers at the three regulators (24% between 2006/07 and 2012/13, from 6,514 to 8,883) were only a minor cause of the doubling.

Other causes, according to the partners, could be a major market surveillance effort involving the hiring of much more experienced, specialised staff than previously at higher salaries. The researchers believe that banking, asset management and insurance sectors are doing the same, although they muddy the waters by saying that the firms, as opposed to the regulators, are investing in IT systems to monitor and report on transactions as well as investing in skilful people.

The biggest increase in spending was at the SFC, which saw a 118% rise from $541 million during the 2006/07 fiscal year to nearly $1.2 billion by the end of the 2012/13 fiscal year. This compares favourably with a 61% increase at the SEC and a 48% increase at the FSA/FCA over the same period. Monique Melis, Kinetic's global head of consulting, thought that co-ordination between regulators in different countries might have had something to do with it.

The research, then, is a rag-bag of figures drawn from the tiniest sample possible - that of 3 - and those figures differ wildly. Can any lessons be drawn, apart from the obvious one that regulation is weighing more heavily on the financial sector all the time and that this is bound to manifest itself in the regulators' budgets? Whether readers believe the FCA, SEC and SFC to be typical regulators on the international scene is another matter entirely.