Notizie da Basilea...
Il dibattito sui parametri da fissare per le banche sistemiche sembra aver fatto un altro passo avanti. Entro novembre si dovrebbe giungere ad una loro identificazione.
Basel Develops Method to Identify Banks Posing Systemic Risk
By Jim Brunsden
April 6 (Bloomberg) --International regulators have agreed on a way to identify the banks that must hold extra capital reserves to avoid collapses that would undermine global financial stability.
The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has “developed a methodology that embodies the key components of systemic importance,” Stefan Walter, the group’s secretary general, said in comments prepared for a speech in Basel today. This would allow a “differentiated treatment” of banks “without needing to specify a fixed list.”
Deutsche Bank AG Chief Executive Officer Josef Ackermann last month criticized efforts to force the world’s biggest lenders to hold extra reserves. The Group of 20 nations has called for capital surcharges for lenders whose failure would imperil the wider financial system.
“There is still a lot of confusion in the market, and I have a sense that regulators are still working on the details of this,” said Patricia Jackson, head of prudential advisory at Ernst & Young LLP in London, adding that authorities have “different views” on the requirements.
Global regulators don’t yet have a list of such banks, Financial Stability Board Chairman Mario Draghi said after the board’s meeting in Rome yesterday. The FSB, which asked the Basel committee to draft the capital-surcharge rules, said it will follow an “accelerated timetable” toward agreeing on the measures by a meeting of G-20 leaders in November.
Global ‘Complexity’
The Basel group’s parameters for measuring the lenders “are size, interconnectedness, substitutability, global activity and complexity,” Walter said.
Listing banks eligible for the surcharge would be based on “spurious criteria, which, in turn, will create incentives to manipulate such lists for political reasons,” Ackermann said last month.
The Basel committee is “continuing” to study whether so- called CoCo bonds, and other contingent capital instruments, could form part of a capital surcharge for too-big-to-fail banks, Walter said.
Common equity, which includes mainly a banks’ ordinary stock and retained earnings, is “the key” to enable systemic banks to “absorb losses with certainty, thus reducing the probability of failure,” he said.
Bondholder Losses
Regulators are also reviewing the role that bondholder losses could play in helping to absorb losses at banks on the brink of collapse.
Walter said the Basel committee will also “monitor” so- called so-called shadow banks such as hedge funds, money market mutual funds and certain securitization structures, to stop them escaping efforts to prevent another financial crisis.
“Shadow banking was a key mechanism through which the crisis was propagated,” Walter said. His comments follow the FSB’s promise yesterday to “develop recommendations” on shadow banking rules by November.
Authorities have warned that shadow banks could be used to evade attempts by regulators to clamp down on excessive risk taking in the wake of the crisis. The shadow-banking system had liabilities of about $16 trillion in the first quarter of 2010, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said in a report last year.
The Basel committee brings together authorities from 27- countries including the U.K., U.S. and China, to set regulatory standards for lenders.
The FSB was founded in 2009. It replaced the Financial Stability Forum, a think tank with no formal role that was created in 1999 after the Asian financial crisis.
.
