Regulators agree tough rules on bank capital
By Norma Cohen and Patrick Jenkins in London and James Wilson in Frankfurt
Published: September 7 2009 18:24 | Last updated: September 8 2009 08:36
Regulators have agreed tough new rules for banks that flesh out proposals agreed by the
G20 group of nations over the weekend that would force many in Europe to raise tens of billions of euros in capital in coming months.
The rules will force banks to substantially improve the quality and extent of the capital buffers they hold to absorb shocks.
At least half of the capital cushion of banks must comprise common equity and retained earnings under measures agreed by the powerful Basel committee of central bank governors and bank regulators, according to people familiar with the discussions.
The committee also agreed to put “hard” limits how much banks can borrow. It is likely to set a ceiling on borrowings of no more than 25 times assets. There will be no exceptions for less risky assets.
Moreover, it also agreed that bank supervisors should be able to limit the ability of banks to make payouts to shareholders through dividends or buy-backs when times are good, enabling them to build “counter-cyclical” buffers against bad times.
The Basel committee is expected to put out concrete proposals by the end of the year and adjust them by the end of 2010 after carrying out an impact assessment.
European banks are expected to be hardest hit by the Basel committee moves as complex securities constitute a large part of their capital cushions than their US peers. The securities, a mixture of debt and equity, are known as hybrid capital.
The list of banks that need to raise common equity could include Germany’s
Commerzbank and
Lloyds Banking Group in the UK, as well as French and Italian banks, assuming the Italians participate in the coming weeks in the planned issue of so-called Tremonti bonds. Analysts forecast rights issues from early 2010.
Kian Abouhossein, analyst at JPMorgan, said: “I think the first banks to be forced to raise equity will be those that have hybrid capital from governments.”
Hybrid capital covers a variety of instruments, such as preference shares, that are not pure equity but have traditionally been deemed close enough to it to count towards a bank’s tier one capital ratio – the key measure of financial strength.
Some European banks have traditionally held a lot of their capital in hybrid form in an effort to minimise the dilution to equity investors from having to raise fresh funds. Regulators in Europe have allowed banks to hold more hybrid capital than their US counterparts – up to a third of total tier one capital in some jurisdictions. But that has proved problematic in the financial crisis, since hybrid capital does not have the same loss-bearing capacity as true shareholders’ equity.
Some banks – from
Royal Bank of Scotland to Switzerland’s
UBS –
have been buying back their own hybrid debt at knock-down prices in recent months in a tactic aimed at boosting core tier one ratios with the profit on the transactions.
But many German banks, in particular, still have very high levels of “hybrid” capital and, in contrast to other countries, there has been little or no fresh equity issuance to offset it.