News Topic: regulation-reform

The $22.5 billion Structured Agency Credit Risk transaction serves its purpose, but shows how much more work and thinking needs to be done to redesign the housing finance system. ... Read full article

The $22.5 billion Structured Agency Credit Risk transaction serves its purpose, but shows how much more work and thinking needs to be done to redesign the housing finance system. ... Read full article

Thanks to enhanced regulatory expectations, directors and managers have more new responsibilities than they might realize. ... Read full article

The proposal has calculations that would address deficiencies, but also tries to balance risk sensitivity with not making the derivatives counterparty charges overly complex. ... Read full article

Lower borrowing costs for the biggest institutions based on perceived government support encourage these institutions to grow larger and more systemically important. This dynamic also puts community banks at a competitive disadvantage. ... Read full article

Modern banking exposes our financial system to considerable risks. Government attempts to contain these risks exacerbate them. Here’s a proposed alternative: A “Depositary” that stores money for a fee without lending. ... Read full article

A recap of the informed opinions (and the discussions they generated) on BankThink this week. ... Read full article

Governments need to consider the advantages of a good bank-bad bank restructuring while loan assets currently have determinable and probably higher values than earlier in the crisis. ... Read full article

The debate over the Warren-McCain bill should start by correcting some popular misunderstandings. ... Read full article

Politicians who blindly supported restrictive AML guidelines now proclaim disgust as a global bank severs relationships with firms that send money to Somalia. But Barclays is merely exercising understandable caution. ... Read full article

Even free-marketeers must recognize initial conditions. The markets we have today are set up to invest in government-guaranteed mortgage-backed securities. To remove the guarantee without crippling damage would take decades. ... Read full article

Until banks' RWA disclosures improve and become more uniform globally, capital ratios will remain a mystery to many journalists, investors, banks and even some supervisors. ... Read full article

Securing an economically and fiscally sensible approach to housing finance reform is taking a backseat to entrenched political views on both sides of the aisle. ... Read full article

The Corker-Warner bill and House GOP bill both understand that the fundamental GSE model is insidious and needs to be definitively terminated. ... Read full article

Two new bills in Congress would undermine Dodd-Frank’s ability-to-repay rule and recreate incentives for lenders to steer families into high-risk, high-fee loans they do not understand and cannot afford. ... Read full article

An emphasis on capital to the exclusion of all else is, at best, misleading and, at worst, harmful to the banking business model. ... Read full article

The new leverage ratio is a relatively modest proposal that can be easily addressed by the affected banks without material capital raises or changes in distribution policy. ... Read full article

An encompassing denominator and full disclosure requirements should assuage concerns that Basel fails to go far enough to cushion banks for unexpected losses. ... Read full article