By Rebecca Christie and Caroline Connan
Published February 26, 2013 Bloomberg
The European Union must press ahead with global bank capital standards to avoid fresh delays and to give certainty to lenders that must abide by the overhaul, the bloc’s financial services chief said today.
“We need agreed rules as soon as possible so that banks know which way they are going,” Michel Barnier said in an interview on the sidelines of a conference in Paris.
By David Clark
Published February 22, 2013 The Trade
The latest approach by global regulators to establish a framework for margin payments against non-cleared swaps will eliminate some unnecessary costs but still fails to address the core concerns of banks.
A joint consultation last week from the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) and the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) proposed an exemption for initial margin payments on the first €50 million of bilateral swaps deals. Variation margin would need to be posted, based on the mark-to-market value of a trade on a daily
By Ben Moshinsky
Published February 21, 2013 Bloomberg
Europe’s top banking regulator will start ranking financial assets in order of liquidity as it implements international rules to protect banks from a sudden loss of short-term funding.
The European Banking Authority will create a “scorecard” of asset liquidity, the agency said in an e-mailed statement, as part of requirements that banks hold a buffer of assets, known as the Liquidity Coverage Ratio, they can quickly sell to survive a 30-day credit squeeze.
By Jim Brunsden
Published January 28, 2013 Bloomberg
The European Union is weighing a one-year delay to the deadline for lenders to disclose whether they meet a debt ratio, in the latest blow to the global timetable for applying Basel bank rules, according to three people familiar with the discussions.
EU nations may seek to push the start date for mandatory disclosure of this so-called leverage ratio from Jan. 1, 2015, to Jan. 1, 2016, said the people, who couldn’t be named because the talks are private. The revised date was discussed by diplomats at a meeting today, they said.
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By Joel Clark, Matt Cameron, Lukas Becker, and Duncan Wood
Published January 25, 2013 Risk
New global standards on derivatives margin requirements appear to be facing significant delays, amid claims policy-makers have been unable to agree on the treatment of foreign exchange derivatives, and are also now planning to launch a second consultation, in part because of worries about the amount of collateral the current proposals would consume.
The standards are being drawn up by the Working Group on Margining Requirements (WGMR) - a joint working group of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and the International Organization of Securities Commissions - and would apply to over-the-counter derivatives that are not centrally cleared. Proposals were published in July last year, but were due to be finalised by the end of 2012.
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By Karen Shaw Petrou
Published January 16, 2013 American Banker
A seemingly-technical rewrite to the Basel III liquidity rules has attracted a remarkable amount of attention, including a recent editorial from The New York Times, a newspaper usually too august to parse complex international banking rules.
Much of this public scrutiny has pronounced the revised liquidity rules "watered down." In fact, they aren't, but one change still contemplated by the Basel Committee could not only dilute the liquidity rules, but also brew a heady cocktail for too-big-to-fail banks outside the United States.
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By Brooke Masters and Alex Barker
Published January 9, 2013 Financial Times
Two of the important changes that global regulators made this week to the first worldwide liquidity rules are so narrowly tailored that many banks will not benefit from the softened requirements.
Bankers and traders have praised the decision by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision for allowing them to count “high quality” mortgage-backed securities towards their required stocks of easy to sell assets. However the fine print of the rule change means that almost all US residential mortgage-backed securities will not qualify.
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By Brooke Masters and Shahien Nasiripour
Published January 7, 2013 Financial Times
Since the financial crisis, banking regulators have given relatively short shrift to complaints from the sector that new rules are too tight and could harm profitability.
It was therefore all the more unusual when the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision said on Sunday that it was softening the first-ever global liquidity requirements and delaying their full implementation until 2019.
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By Brooke Masters
Published January 6, 2013 Financial Times
International banks received a new year fillip when regulators announced that the first ever global liquidity standards would be less onerous than expected and not be fully enforced until 2019, four years later than expected.
Aimed at preventing a repeat of the 2008 bank collapses, the “liquidity coverage ratio” (LCR) announced on Sunday marks the first time that global regulators have sought to require individual banks to hold enough cash and easy-to-sell assets to allow them to survive a short-term market crisis. The measure is the second critical plank of the Basel III reform package. Tougher new capital rules began to be phased in this month.
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By Yalman Onaran
Published January 2, 2013 Bloomberg
The first Basel agreement on global banking regulation, adopted in 1988, was 30 pages long and relied on simple arithmetic. The latest update, known as Basel III, runs to 509 pages and includes 78 calculus equations.
The complexity is emblematic of what happened over the past four years as governments that injected $600 billion to rescue failing banks during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression devised ways to make the global banking system safer. Those efforts have been stymied by conflicting laws, divergent accounting standards and clashing rules adopted by nations to protect their interests, all of which have created new risks.
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