How Basel III leaves banks with weak points on both sides of the Atlantic - FT中文网
登录×
电子邮件/用户名
密码
记住我
请输入邮箱和密码进行绑定操作:
请输入手机号码,通过短信验证(目前仅支持中国大陆地区的手机号):
请您阅读我们的用户注册协议隐私权保护政策,点击下方按钮即视为您接受。
观点 金融和市场监管

How Basel III leaves banks with weak points on both sides of the Atlantic

Compromises on regulation will mean more vulnerabilities in a crisis

Basel III: if ever there were three syllables that could bring a grown banker to tears, these are they. In the 15-plus years since the financial crisis, the western world has been through a protracted process of rewriting regulations to protect against another 2008. The last pieces of that puzzle — conceived by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and known as Basel 3.1 — are now close to being slotted into place across the western world

Until recently, US banks thought they were set to come off worst. Federal Reserve vice-chair for supervision Michael Barr had gold-plated the Basel rules, provoking a fierce backlash from Wall Street’s finest. But that lobbying, and the placatory intervention of Fed chair Jay Powell, appears likely to leave US banks with a watered-down impact that will be very similar to their European rivals — an uplift of perhaps 10 per cent in their capital requirements compared with the 20 per cent or so previously predicted, according to bankers.

The oddest feature of the US reforms is that most small and mid-sized banks will escape tougher treatment, despite the fact that it was precisely mid-sized regional banks that were the focus of depositor jitters last year, when the likes of Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic collapsed. (Only this month New York Community Bank needed an emergency capital infusion.) Yes, the definition of what constitutes a large bank has been expanded to anything greater than $100bn, rather than $250bn, but that still leaves thousands of lenders — all but the top 99 — to pose a potential systemic risk.

In Europe, less obvious dangers may accumulate. Last year, EU and UK banks and regulators felt quietly smug when the region’s institutions emerged unscathed from the market turmoil and client nervousness that brought down Switzerland’s Credit Suisse and the US regionals. But the way in which the EU is implementing Basel 3.1 — particularly the way it embeds a previously temporary provision giving capital relief to banks with insurance subsidiaries — is a cause for concern.

Policymakers argued that this so-called Danish Compromise was justified because insurers are also closely supervised financial institutions, so they should be treated as less risky investments in bank capital terms than other subsidiary holdings. But in essence the Danish Compromise — conceived during Denmark’s 2012 EU presidency — was a sop to help banks that owned insurance operations and found themselves stretched for capital amid the eurozone crisis.

Much of that stress came about because of the “doom loop” stemming from banks’ ownership of so much of the sovereign debt of their stressed home countries. The falling value of this debt led to bank losses, which then led to lending cutbacks, further hitting economies. Ironically, the Danish Compromise and the encouragement it gives to buy more bonds amplifies that risk. Some regulators and independent insurers complain the measure is a political fudge, and fought — but failed — to have it removed from the new rule book. “The impact on increasing systemic risk is massive,” says one insurer.

One particular area for concern is exactly the issue that tripped up US regional banks: in the higher-interest-rate environment, large volumes of hidden losses accumulated on long-dated bonds. The value of eurozone banks’ domestic government bond exposure, currently €1.5tn, slumped nearly 20 per cent in the two years to early 2023.

And while European bank rules mean losses for most banks are transparently accounted for, and insurers apply similar fair-value accounting, there is a mismatch when insurance subsidiaries are consolidated into bank parent companies. Losses in the insurance subsidiary are not reflected in the bank’s consolidated accounts. (Data on insurers’ sovereign exposure is less granular, but across the European Economic Area is about 1.6tn.)

The issue is troubling on other grounds, too. The politically convenient fiction that all eurozone sovereign bonds are risk-free means that banks need set no capital against them. At the same time there is less effective regulatory supervision of a so-called bancassurer because the structure of banking and insurance supervision is split between the ECB and the less muscular European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority.

The final phase of post-2008 Basel III regulation will boost the solidity of much of the global banking system. But thanks to a Mexican stand-off in the US, and a Danish Compromise in the eurozone, there are still weak points. And a crisis does love a weak point.

patrick.jenkins@ft.com

版权声明:本文版权归FT中文网所有,未经允许任何单位或个人不得转载,复制或以任何其他方式使用本文全部或部分,侵权必究。

对话Otter.ai的梁松:我们可以从会议和对话中获取有价值的数据

这家会议转录初创公司的联合创始人认为,我们甚至可以用虚拟形象代替自己进行工作互动。

朔尔茨迎来自己的“拜登时刻”

德国总理受到党内压力,要求其效仿美国总统拜登退出竞选。

欧盟极右翼党团在气候和高层任命问题上获得更多支持

欧洲议会中右翼议员正越来越多地与极右翼联手瓦解该集团的绿色议程,并推动更严格的移民限制措施。

毛利人对新西兰后阿德恩时代的民粹主义转向感到愤怒

卢克森的保守党政府推翻了前总理的许多进步政策。

Lex专栏:英伟达令人炫目的增长与每个人都息息相关

这家芯片巨头的盈利对美国股票投资者来说是一件大事,这不仅仅是因为其3.6万亿美元的市值。

欧洲比以往任何时候都更需要企业增长冠军

欧洲正在急切地寻找企业增长冠军,FT-Statista按长期收入增长对欧洲企业进行的首次排名展示了这方面的可能性。
设置字号×
最小
较小
默认
较大
最大
分享×