Basel III Implementation - The Last Mile Is Always The Hardest
Basel III Implementation - The Last Mile Is Always The Hardest
Basel III Implementation - The Last Mile Is Always The Hardest
SPEECH
I am very grateful for the invitation to speak to you at this alumni meeting
of the Associazione Marco Fanno. The Associazione has a long tradition of
providing financial support for advanced studies in economics at
internationally renowned universities. Since the 1960s numerous leading
academics and policymakers in the field – many Italian, but not all – have
benefited from the Associazione’s scholarships and previously existing
affiliated schemes.
Rather predictably, my remarks tonight will focus on banking issues. More
specifically, I would like to talk about international banking regulation. Later
this year we expect the European Commission to issue the legislative
proposals to implement the final package of the reforms agreed by the Basel
Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS). This last step completes the
policy response to the great financial crisis. The Governors and Heads of
Supervision (GHOS) in turn have committed to refrain from launching major
adjustments to the international standards for the foreseeable future.[1]
But the last lap of this long process is still facing fierce opposition from some
in the banking industry who argue that the impact of the reforms might
adversely affect banks’ capacity to support the recovery from the
coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic shock. I am firmly convinced that a full
and timely implementation of this last set of international standards is in the
interest of all stakeholders. It requires only limited adjustments in the short
term but will deliver the necessary structural improvements to our
regulatory framework as well as sizeable and long-lasting benefits for our
economies. Most importantly, I believe that the effectiveness of international
standards, which is of great value to supervisory authorities and
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Before I go into the detail of the final stretch of this journey – the
implementation of the final Basel III package – I would like to briefly look
back on how the journey began and how banks’ internal models, which the
package addresses, came to the fore of international discussions.
The BCBS was established in the mid-1970s after the collapse of the German
bank Herstatt. Its creation reflected the awareness that, after three decades
of financial stability (although some would perhaps say three decades of
financial repression), the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed
exchange rates and the ensuing free-floating exchange rate system had
given new momentum to the international banking business, and banking
regulation and supervision needed to catch up.
As well documented by Charles Goodhart in his excellent book on the early
years of the Basel Committee[2], the newly constituted Committee was
initially more concerned about supervisory cooperation than standard
setting. The Basel Committee’s first document of note was in fact the Basel
Concordat. In the wake of the collapse of Herstatt, the Concordat sought to
set out the respective responsibilities of what we refer to in supervisory
jargon as the “home” and the “host” authorities of international banking
groups, as well as their duties of cooperation. The Concordat was revised in
the aftermath of other international banking crises, like that of Banco
Ambrosiano, and remained for many years the main point of reference for
the activities of the Committee, and its main focus was international
supervisory cooperation.
Now, it is important to underscore that Basel regulatory cycles are very long
policymaking processes that take many years to complete. The highly
technical nature of the subject matter requires detailed discussions at the
negotiating table, consultations with the industry, impact assessment
exercises and appropriate transitional periods to be defined before the new
rules can actually become fully applicable. This last point is crucial to avoid
disrupting the macroeconomic cycle with sudden changes in the regulatory
requirements which modify incentives, alter the functioning of banks’
business models and, ultimately, affect the allocation of financial resources
to the real economy.
Let’s take the first Basel Capital Accord as our starting point. Negotiations on
a global regulatory capital standard for banks had already started in the
early 1980s in the aftermath of the Latin American debt crisis, but the
Committee only reached an agreement in 1988, with an implementation
date being set for the end of 1992. This was achieved in the European Union
(or European Community, as it was at the time) in 1989 through a suite of
Directives, including the Solvency Ratio Directive and the Second Banking
Coordination Directive, which were then transposed into the legal
frameworks of all Member States.[3] Compared with the later accords, Basel I
was notable for its simplicity but also its very limited scope for risk
sensitivity. It established a simple minimum capital requirement of 8% of
own funds of variable quality (common equity could, in the end, be as low as
2% of risk-weighted assets) and a few coarse risk weights for specified asset
classes divided into 0%, 20%, 50% and 100% risk buckets. One of the key
trade-offs in prudential regulation – between the simplicity of the rules and
their risk sensitivity – would soon take centre stage.
Two developments made supervisory authorities realise that these broad-
brush requirements were fast becoming obsolete. First, exactly in the same
years of the definition of the Accord banks’ internal risk management
techniques started to become more sophisticated[4], so that the risk
sensitivity of the regulatory framework was falling out of touch with best
market practices for the internal allocation of economic capital. Second,
research conducted by the Federal Reserve System showed that banks had
managed to develop a number of practices, such as expanding off-balance
sheet activities, like securitisation, or adjusting effective exposures to risk
within the broad buckets defined by the first Accord, to increase their level
of risk-taking without being captured by regulatory requirements.
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The need to bring regulation closer to the real risks involved in certain
activities and prevent regulatory arbitrage opened the door to the regulatory
recognition of banks’ internal models. If it was possible to measure risk in a
more granular fashion for risk management purposes, then the same
method should be used to quantify regulatory capital, as it would make the
regulatory framework more efficient and more incentive-compatible.
In this context, in 1996 a market risk amendment to the Basel I Accord was
agreed. For the first time, banks could use internal risk models to calculate
regulatory requirements for market risk (but not credit risk). With the
second Basel Capital Accord (known as Basel II), which was agreed in 2004
to become applicable in 2007, the internal model approach was extended to
the calculation of capital requirements for credit risk, counterparty credit risk
and operational risk.[5] The use of internal models was embedded in
prudential requirements to calculate risk-weighted exposure amounts, the
denominator of the capital requirement ratio.
In actual fact, some of the jurisdictions at the epicentre of the great financial
crisis, such as the United States, had not yet allowed banks to use internal
models. The Basel Committee’s “use test”, which required banks to use the
same models for internal risk management purposes as for the calculation of
regulatory requirements, was intended to foster reliance on best market
practices. And the ease with which sophisticated international banks
managed to circumvent the simpler regulatory requirements of Basel I had,
in the end, left the international supervisory community with no credible
alternative.
As the risk density decreased, banks were able to carry out more business
based on the same absolute amount of own funds, thus expanding their
balance sheets. They increased their leverage while still complying with the
risk-weighted capital requirements and, in some cases, even increased their
regulatory ratios.
apparent that in the last three decades there has been a mind-boggling
increase in the complexity of the regulatory framework and the attendant
legislative instruments. This has had an impact not only on the complexity of
banking business, but also that of supervisory activities (for example
supervision of internal models) and investors’ analysis.
For all the reasons I mentioned, and with the aim of restoring the credibility
of the international standards and simplifying the framework somewhat, the
Basel Committee engaged in a last lengthy and thorny round of negotiations
to finalise its post-crisis standards on the calculation of risk-weighted assets,
which is really the core of prudential banking regulation. And this is where
the last mile of the title of my speech comes in – as we are now in the last
mile of a long regulatory marathon stretching back more than 40 years.
The agreement reached in 2017, among other things, restricts the use of
banks’ internal models across several dimensions. These restrictions include
(i) removing loss given default modelling for low-default portfolios (namely
banks and large corporates) and all credit risk modelling for equity
portfolios; (ii) introducing several model input floors in the area of credit
risk; and (iii) removing the use of internal models for operational risk and
credit value adjustment risk. In addition, the agreement imposes a much-
discussed output floor, that is the requirement that risk-weighted assets
resulting from internal models cannot be less than 72.5% of the risk-
weighted assets deriving from the standardised approach. It should also be
noted that, to maintain an overall high level of risk sensitivity, the reform
improves the granularity of several standardised approaches and reduces
their reliance on external ratings.
simulation is based on the June 2020 Eurosystem staff macroeconomic projections and assumes the
start of the reform at the end of 2019. The post-COVID-19 simulation is based on the June 2020
Eurosystem staff macroeconomic projections and assumes the start of the reform at the end of 2022.
Basel III stands for the Basel III framework.
It is more apparent than ever that a more resilient and better capitalised
banking sector, rather than acting as a drag on macroeconomic
performance, is actually helping the real economy to perform better in good
times as well as bad, hence smoothing the business cycle. An additional
reason not to delay further the implementation of a long overdue reform.
The last point I would like to make concerns the modalities of the
implementation in the EU of the final Basel III Accord and, in particular, the
thorny issue of the output floor. In the eyes of many members of the Basel
Committee this is an indispensable element of the reform, in terms of
guaranteeing a global level playing field which has always been, as we have
seen at the beginning, one of the foremost objectives of the Committee.
I consider it of fundamental importance that the Union legislature, when
implementing the output floor, does not give in to the temptation to
introduce creative approaches. I am clearly referring to proposals like the
parallel stack approach that, in the end, as already confirmed by the
European Banking Authority,[13] are not actually in line with the
internationally agreed standards but impair their very effectiveness and the
comparability of capital ratios across banks and jurisdictions. There should
be only one amount of risk-weighted assets for each individual bank and
which takes into account the floor set down by the internationally agreed
standard. A calculation of the risk-weighted assets of banks at variable
geometry, so to speak, once with the floor and once without the floor, would
only increase the complexity of the framework ‒ introducing additional
confusion and stoking uncertainty for market participants.
I have already said, and I can reiterate this here now, that, as supervisors,
we are ready to mitigate any unintended effects of an accurate
implementation of the output floor. In particular, when setting our Pillar 2
capital requirements, we will avoid any double-counting of model risk and
any sorts of unwarranted regulatory drag from the recalculation of risk
weights linked to the floor. I can confirm that, if risk-weighted assets
increase as an effect of applying the floor, we will not let Pillar 2
requirements to automatically rise in absolute value, in the absence of a
corresponding increase in the underlying risks.[14]
Conclusion
Ladies and Gentlemen, I have talked to you today about the long cycles of
international banking regulation. I have probably taken a longer historical
detour than I would have liked, but without that history it would be next to
impossible to understand the complexity of the current framework.
We are now at a defining juncture where the quest for internationally agreed
capital adequacy requirements for banks will soon be coming to an end. As
already mentioned, the Governors and Heads of Supervision of the G20
clearly committed the BCBS to abstain from major regulatory changes in the
Basel framework in the near future. There might be some adjustments at the
margin, reflecting the assessment of the effectiveness of the reforms and
their complexity, but I do not expect major regulatory overhauls.
When banks are complaining about regulatory fatigue, I can assure you that
this fatigue is also shared by regulatory and supervisory authorities around
the globe.
[5]Following the fundamental review of the trading book, internal models were also introduced for the
calculation of capital requirements for credit valuation adjustment risk.
[6]See ESRB (2014), “Is Europe Overbanked?”, Reports of the Advisory Scientific Committee, No 4, June, p. 8.
[7]Haldane, A.G. (2012), “The dog and the frisbee”, speech at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas
City’s 366th economic policy symposium “The changing policy landscape”, Jackson Hole, Wyoming,
August, pp. 10-11.
[8]See,for instance, J.M. Keynes (1937), “The General Theory of Employment”, The Quarterly Journal of
Economics, Vol. 51, No 2, pp. 209-223, in particular pp. 212-214: “But at any given time facts and
expectations were assumed to be given in a definite and calculable form; and risks, of which, tho
admitted, not much notice was taken, were supposed to be capable of an exact actuarial computation.
The calculus of probability, tho mention of it was kept in the background, was supposed to be capable
of reducing uncertainty to the same calculable status as that of certainty itself”. And later: “By
‘uncertain’ knowledge, let me explain, I do not mean merely to distinguish what is known from certain
from what is only probable… The sense in which I am using the term is that in which the prospect of a
European war is uncertain, or the price of copper and the rate of interest twenty years hence, or the
obsolescence of a new invention… About these matters there is no scientific basis on which to form
any calculable probability whatsoever. We simply do not know.”
[9]Acomplete consolidated version of the current Basel framework, also periodically updated, is
available on the Bank for International Settlements’ website.
[10]SeeBasel Committee (2020), “Governors and Heads of Supervision announce deferral of Basel III
implementation to increase operational capacity of banks and supervisors to respond to Covid-19”,
press release, 27 March.
[11]See
Budnik, K. et al. (2021), “The macroeconomic impact assessment of Basel III finalisation in
Europe”, Macroprudential Bulletin, No 14, ECB, forthcoming.
[12]See
ECB (2021), “ECB’s large-scale review boosts reliability and comparability of banks’ internal
models”, press release, 19 April.
[13]SeeEuropean Banking Authority (2019), “Policy advice on the Basel III reforms: output floor”, 2
August.
[14]SeeEnria, A. (2019), “Basel III – Journey or destination?”, keynote speech at the European
Commission's DG for Financial Stability, Financial Services and Capital Markets Union conference on
the implementation of Basel III, Brussels, 12 November.