Regulation is currently based on the global Basel III accords that were agreed by regulators in 2010, two years after reckless lending by U.S. and European banks caused the biggest financial crisis in nearly 80 years and a wrenching recession across most of the world.<\/p>\n
Basel III drastically increased the amount of capital and liquidity that banks have to hold to protect themselves against a possible repeat. But the accords were aimed primarily at big international institutions whose operations were capable of destabilizing the global financial system; as the impact of the 2008-2009 disaster has faded, regulators have grudgingly come to accept that their response went too far.<\/p>\n
The U.S.<\/a>, Switzerland<\/a> and the U.K.<\/a> have already implemented less intrusive regimes for smaller banks with simpler business models.<\/p>\n \u201cWith the proposal for an EU small banks regime, we have provided important impetus to the discussions on simplifying the regulatory framework,\u201d Michael Theurer, the Bundesbank\u2019s head of banking supervision, said in emailed comments, stressing that the proposal \u201cdoes not represent a departure from the Basel framework.\u201d<\/p>\n The framework would be open to banks with less than \u20ac10 billion in assets and with a mainly domestic focus (at least 75 per cent of their business should be in the European Economic Area). Banks using it would not be allowed to hold any cryptocurrency assets such as Bitcoin, and would be allowed to hold only minimal amounts of derivatives or assets for trading purposes. They would also have to prove that their vulnerability to changes in interest rates is acceptably low.<\/p>\n \u2018Paradigm shift\u2019<\/p>\n Under the Capital Requirements Regulation, which applies Basel III in the EU, banks are generally required to report two capital ratios \u2014 one adjusted for risk, and one unadjusted. The latter, known as the leverage ratio, was originally intended as a backstop to prevent larger banks from gaming the system by understating the risks on their books under internal models allowed by the accords<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Regulation is currently based on the global Basel III accords that were agreed by regulators in 2010, two…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":365750,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5310],"tags":[3427,128150,331,11328,6725,6659,2825,102850,2000,299,1824,478,54157,128151,2443,2600,15,49],"class_list":{"0":"post-365749","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-banking","9":"tag-banking-supervision","10":"tag-banks","11":"tag-basel-iii","12":"tag-central-banks","13":"tag-crisis","14":"tag-debt","15":"tag-derivatives","16":"tag-eu","17":"tag-europe","18":"tag-germany","19":"tag-interest-rates","20":"tag-liquidity","21":"tag-michael-theurer","22":"tag-regulation","23":"tag-switzerland","24":"tag-united-kingdom","25":"tag-united-states"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=365749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365749\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/365750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=365749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=365749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=365749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}