Basel Norms

Financial crisis has been regarded as one of the most important issues in recent years, especially after the previous financial crisis during 2007-2009. As the impact of the financial crisis is growing, the way to restrain and prevent the financial crisis has become the main research direction. This essay is going to analysis the improvement of the financial market, thereby preventing and suppressing the occurrence of the financial crisis. Firstly, the background of the financial crisis will be introduced. Secondly, the main contributing factors of the financial crisis in 2008 are going to be discussed, for example, subprime mortgage problem, financial innovation problems, credit rating agencies problem within financial market. Thirdly, the role and influence of the Basel Accords are going to be analyzed, particularly looking at changes of capital adequacy through Basel I, II, and III. In the end, the relationship between Basel Accords and financial crisis are going to be explored, going through the Basal Accord’s impact on the financial market. Some of the main points of this essay are going to be summarized in the conclusion such as Basel Accords are helpful for stabilization of the financial market.

After our throughout research on Basel III regulation and it’s pros and cons, our group came to the conclusion that Basel III indeed made the banking system to become more stable and safe compared to the time where there is no Basel III regulation. Before we begin to defense our standpoint, we would like to have a short review of what exactly Basel III is.

The Basel Accords is a set of regulations adhered by banks. The main goal was to help banks maintain a minimum capital to sustain losses during a bad economy period. Also, to aid financial institutions reduce risk while they grow and operate.

Firstly, the Dodd–Frank Act pushes forward the reformation of America's financial regulatory system. Several new regulatory authorities are set up to enhance the government supervision and administration of the industry. The Financial Stability Oversight Council is established to identify material risks to financial stability, with the support from Office of Financial Research. Moreover, Fed is entitled to exercise additional superintendence beyond banks.

Since the onset of the financial crisis 2008, the sovereign debt crisis in western economies and the new financial regulation with Basel III coming up, the financial industry faces the challenge of reinventing itself. The ring-fence for Commercial and Investment Banking, and new economic and regulatory capital requirements will determine the kinds of products banks will be able to distribute. It will have a huge impact in the Investment Banking business, which will suffer tough regulation and supervisory procedures. At the same time, credit risk models will be reviewed because they have failed to predict the crisis of 2008. The current financial and economic crisis doesn’t have any precedent in the past.

This paper is about the financial crisis in 2008 and how it all started as well as the ways that banking has operated and is operating today. I have watched all of Chairman Bernanke’s college lecture videos and he has gone into many different aspects of banking including how the Federal Reserve began, what lead to the recent financial crisis, and what we are doing as a nation to see what we can do to help eliminate from happening again. First, I will be summarizing Chairman Bernanke’s four lectures he did in 2012 at George Washington University.

However, Bernanke admonished investors by the book that even though banking regulation and supervision protect investors as always, if some particular events or financial crisis happened, like housing bubble and mortgage markets crisis, either or both of these two system work. The example in the book is booming house prices in 2000s. After the sharply increasing of housing prices, risky mortgage lending likes subprime lending trouble began surfacing in 2006 and 2007. The risky mortgage comes with more demand for housing, which will again push the housing prices higher and higher, reinforcing a vicious cycle. As a result, because of the nominate housing price is much higher than the real price, the careful lenders who have good credit step out the market, the rest of borrowers are subprime lenders, “some borrowers were defaulting on loan after making only a few, or even no, payments.” (318) In the book, Bernanke conceded that Fed responded the trouble slowly and cautiously. When Board in Washington determined to make supervision of bank more centralized, he still overconfidently believe that Reserve Bank staff were better informed about condition in their districts. Another Bernanke’s conceit is that the financial regulatory system was not as stable and comprehensive as he thought before the financial crisis. In

This position has given it some of the substantial reasons for it to stir the economies of the world, and in the 1990s, the banks in the USA became the financial instruments for deposits of the surplus from the oil producing countries. The Real domestic product (GDP) began to contract towards the third quarter of 2008, with a gradual annual fall since the 1950s (Suter 45). The capital investments which was on the decline in 2006 matching the 1958 post war record in the first quarter of 2009, dropping by 23.2%. Furthermore, the rising tide on bad debt threatened the solvency of most of the banks. The changes in the Federal Reserve policies created panic in the inter-blending market (Gup 44). This was due to the uncertainty in which banks would survive their tenure in the lending of money to anyone leading to the censure of the economy. The investors in the stock market panicked making them send all their stock shares to a free fall. The decline in the shares significantly reduced the capital shares that greatly affected the bank regulatory system as it is based on the idea that the loans borrowed have to be a certain multiple of the bank capital (Dalton 63). This led to a massive decline in the lending system that significantly threatens the stability of the system. The significant effects of the financial crisis were more apparent was first detected in the US

The recent financial crisis has a huge impact on systemic Important Financial Institutions; it’s distressing effect can be felt in almost every business area and process of a bank. A fairly large literature investigates the impact of financial crisis on large, complex and interconnected banks. The great recession did affect banks in different ways, depending on the funding capability of each bank. Kapan and Minoiu (2013) find that banks that were ex ante more dependent on market funding and had lower structural liquidity reduced supply of credit more than other banks during crisis. The ability of banks to generate interest income during the financial crisis was hampered because there was a vast reduction in bank lending to individuals and

In this framework, the loss of liquidity is the result of a market failure, and if the central bank can solve that failure by lending, the result should be an unambiguous social good. After all, central banks are designed to create liquidity and, in the spirit of the classical doctrine of the LOLR (Bagehot, 1873), they should respond forcefully in a crisis. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke described the crisis lending as nothing new and noted that “We did what central banks have done for many years and what they were designed to do: We served as a source of liquidity and stability in financial markets, and, in the broader economy, we worked to foster economic recovery and price stability.”6 Moreover, in the recent crisis, despite a massive loan book that included loans to institutions well outside its traditional network of depository institutions, the Federal Reserve had zero defaults or even delinquencies on those loans even though the crisis proceeded in several increasingly severe waves. While it is never possible to know what could have happened if the situation had worsened further, that all these loans were repaid underscores the important role of liquidity in driving the crisis and raises the question of why liquidity regulations are necessary at all as long as there are sufficiently robust capital

To address this deficiency, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) proposed the post-crisis regulatory capital framework - Basel III, aimed to improve both the quantity and quality of banking organisations regulatory capital and to build additional capacity for loss absorbency into the banking system to withstand markets and economic shocks (BCBS). The importance of capital to a banking organisation cannot be overemphasised, the amount of capital held by a bank determine: (i) the level risk the bank can enter into. (ii) Loss absorbency capacity. (III) The profitability level. (iv) The cost of fund. (v) Investors' confidence, and (vi) the going - concern of the bank. It is vital that banking organisations are able to maintain a balance between their capital risk portfolios. As a result, banks tend to adjust their balance sheet components to achieve an internally set capital

One of the principal functions of financial oversight authorities in achieving a safer, more flexible, and more stable monetary and financial system is to regulate and supervise various financial entities. But following the crisis of 2007, regulatory authorities in the whole world were engaged in a fundamental reconsideration of how they approach financial regulation and supervision. Performing these functions through micro- prudential regulation and supervision of banks, holding companies, their affiliates and other entities, including nonbank financial companies, proved to be insufficient to ensure and maintain financial stability of a country, union or the world as a whole.

The post-crisis regulatory framework has shifted from a framework which was centred on a single regulatory constraint – the risk-weighted capital ratio – to one with multiple constraints. In addition to the risk-weighted ratio, the post-crisis framework also includes a leverage ratio, large exposure limits and two liquidity standards (ie the Liquidity Coverage Ratio and the Net Stable Funding Ratio). And supervisory stress testing is playing an increasingly important role across a number of jurisdictions. Each regulatory measure has strengths and weakness. The multiple metrics framework is more robust to arbitrage and erosion

This chapter is about the background of 2007-2008 financial crisis. The 2007-2008 financial crisis has a huge impact on US banking system and how the banks operate and how they are regulated after the financial turmoil. This financial crisis started with difficulty of rolling over asset backed commercial papers in the summer of 2007 due to uncertainty on the liquidity of mortgage backed securities and questions about the soundness of banks and non-bank financial institutes when interest rate continued to go up at a faster pace since 2004. In March 2008 the second wave of liquidity loss occurred after US government decided to bailout Bear Stearns and some commercial banks, then other financial institutions took it as a warning of financial difficulty of their peers. In the meantime banks started hoarding cash and reserve instead of lending out to fellow banks and corporations. The third wave of credit crunch which eventually brought down US financial system and spread over the globe was Lehman Brother’s bankruptcy in August 2008. Many major commercial banks in US held structured products and commercial papers of Lehman Brother, as a result, they suffered a great loss as Lehman Brother went into insolvency. This panic of bank insolvency caused loss of liquidity in both commercial paper market and inter-bank market. Still banks were reluctant to turn to US government or Federal Reserve as this kind of action might indicate delicacy of

In this essay, we are trying to look at the factors responsible for the global financial crisis in 2008-09 which started in US and later spread across the world. By now, a lot of studies have been done on the global financial crisis of 2008. We explain briefly the role of the financial engineering which leads to combination of various financial securities, the actual risk of which is not clearly assessed and hence leading to the financial crisis. There were also some serious lapses in regulation and failure of the rating agencies in assessing the risks assumed by the financial products which accentuated the crisis.