Ancora sugli stress test
Come al solito, le posizioni più preoccupate sono tenute dalle banche tedesche.
European Stress Tests to Examine Banks’ Readiness for Basel III
By Ben Moshinsky
April 8 (Bloomberg) -- European regulators were criticized by German banks for a plan to incorporate into this year’s stress tests global capital standards that aren’t scheduled to be implemented for eight years.
The European Banking Authority will review the amount of “higher quality and most loss-absorbing” capital on banks’ balance sheets, Andrea Enria, the group’s chairman, said in Vienna this week. The move was criticized by regional German banks including Norddeutsche Landesbank and Landesbank Hessen- Thueringen because the tests may exclude a form of non-voting capital, known as silent participation, which that country’s regulators allow to be counted toward a bank’s reserves.
The EBA is scheduled to announce today which types of capital it will accept, which banks will be tested and the value of assets they must hold to pass. The regulator is expected to set a pass rate requiring 5 percent of core Tier 1 capital under the most-stressed scenario for this year’s tests, the European Commission said. Last year, banks had to hold 6 percent of the less-stringently defined Tier 1 capital.
“I do have some sympathy for the Landesbanken on this,” Simon Gleeson, a partner at Clifford Chance LLP in London, said in a telephone interview. “It does seem a bit rough to do something on the basis of Basel reforms being implemented immediately rather than over several years.”
Under standards set last year by global regulators on the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, silent participation capital won’t be allowed and the value of the highest-quality capital banks must hold would triple. The rules are scheduled for full implementation by 2019.
German Concern
Germany’s Bundesbank and financial regulator BaFin have called for the stress-test information submission deadline to be extended by two weeks, the central bank said yesterday. The original deadline was the end of April, the Bundesbank said.
“The concern in Germany is very much on the definition of capital,” Enria said. “We may like it or not, but since the crisis, the benchmark used by market participants and regulators is high-quality capital.”
At Landesbank Hessen-Thueringen, or Helaba, silent participations -- the funds the state-owned banks receive from savings banks and regional governments -- accounted for more than 50 percent of the total in 2010. At Norddeutsche Landesbank, or NordLB, it amounted to 30.5 percent of capital in September, company figures show.
Nord LB will convert silent capital into core capital to comply with Basel standards by 2015, Carsten Dickhut, a spokesman for the Hanover, Germany-based lender said last month.