Bank Regulation and the Future of Banking

The Committee is following a three-level approach to monitor implementation of the Basel III capital reforms. At the most basic level (Level 1), the Committee is assessing members’ progress in adopting Basel III according to the internationally agreed timetables. The publication of progress reports is intended to encourage all members to get a move on, where necessary. The most recent report showed that Australia was one of 16 of the 27 member countries (treating EU members separately) that had, by the end of March this year, published their draft Basel III regulations or standards.

The third level of the Committee’s approach aims to ensure that the Basel III reforms are delivering consistent outcomes in practice across banks and jurisdictions. This work will initially focus on the measurement of risk-weighted assets, covering both the banking book and the trading book. A variety of tools, including hypothetical/test portfolio exercises, will be used to identify areas of material inconsistencies in the calculation of risk-weighted assets across banks and jurisdictions, as well as areas of broad consistency. An APRA expert is participating in this Level 3 review process, which we see as critical to ensuring a level playing field in the application of Basel capital requirements.

There are three main elements in APRA’s approach to the Basel III capital reforms.

Secondly, APRA is proposing, for in-principle reasons, not to adopt a concessional treatment for certain items in calculating regulatory capital, a discretion available under the Basel III reforms. These items are deferred tax assets relating to ‘temporary’ (timing) differences, significant investments in the common shares of non-consolidated financial institutions, and mortgage servicing rights. APRA has never recognised these items in calculating regulatory capital and to do so now would not, in APRA’s view, be consistent with the objective of raising the quality and quantity of regulatory capital in Australia. Our consultations threw up no compelling reasons to change our in-principle views.

Thirdly, APRA has proposed an accelerated Basel III timetable in some areas. Our timetable is fully consistent with the Basel Committee’s stated view that, where they can, banking institutions should comply with the Basel III reforms as soon as possible. Our banking institutions can comply early, and they should — surely this is the time to be ‘accentuating the positive’. Our larger banks, for example, have already cleared the 2013 hurdle and should be readily able to clear the 2016 hurdle through prudent earnings retention policies.

By not adopting the concessional treatment, APRA’s more conservative approach will lead to published ‘headline’ capital ratios for our banking institutions that are lower than headline ratios of banks in jurisdictions where the discretions will be exercised. We in APRA have been well aware of this issue, which is not new. However, it is not a uniquely Australian issue. A constant complaint during the global financial crisis in a number of jurisdictions, from market participants and supervisors alike, was the difficulty they faced in undertaking detailed assessments of banks’ capital positions and making comparisons across jurisdictions, because of a lack of transparency by banks and a lack of consistency in reporting across banks and jurisdictions. The issue has therefore fallen squarely into the domain of the Basel Committee.

Since late 2011, the Committee has been consulting on a standardised disclosure template that would address concerns about the international comparability of regulatory capital ratios. That template was finalised at the most recent Committee meeting and has now been published. In Australia’s case, the template will capture the details necessary for a reconciliation between the capital positions of our banking institutions measured in terms of the Basel III rules text (presuming adoption of the concessional treatment) and APRA’s more conservative approach. No longer any excuses for the so-called ‘lazy analyst’ not looking behind headline capital ratios to discern the real strength of our banking institutions. The template comes into effect by no later than 30 June 2013, which will give APRA time to translate the disclosure requirements into its prudential standards, after consultation with industry. If it would be helpful, APRA would be prepared to consider expanding the template to simplify the reconciliation process.

Systemically important banks

The elements of the Basel III capital reforms announced in December 2010 are now virtually all in place. However, a new element in global banking reform has emerged, which is particularly relevant to countries like Australia with concentrated banking systems. That element is a framework for dealing with domestic systemically important banks (D-SIBs). At their Cannes Summit in November 2011, the G-20 Leaders, determined to make sure no financial firm is ‘too big to fail’ and that taxpayers should not bear the cost of resolution, asked the Basel Committee and the Financial Stability Board to develop such a framework. The proposed framework builds on, but differs in important respects from, the regime for global systemically important banks (G-SIBs) endorsed by the G-20 Leaders at Cannes.

The focus of global policymakers on systemically important banks reflects concerns about the ‘negative externalities’ or adverse side effects that the distress or failure of such banks can cause. As the Basel Committee has put it, drawing on some basic economic theory, individual banks in maximising their private benefits may rationally choose outcomes that, from a system-wide viewpoint, are suboptimal because they do not take these negative externalities into account. These externalities include the impact of the distress or failure of a systemically important bank on other financial institutions and on the real economy, and the substantial public sector support that might be needed to deal with the problem. Such adverse side effects were writ large in a number of jurisdictions during the crisis.

In addition, the moral hazard costs associated with direct support and implicit government guarantees for banking institutions perceived to be ‘too big to fail’ may amplify risk-taking by these institutions, reduce market discipline, create competitive distortions and further increase the probability of distress in the future.

The response of global policymakers to the ‘too big to fail’ issue has involved two complementary approaches. The first is embodied in the G-SIB regime. This focuses on large, internationally active banks with significant cross-border operations, and it assesses the negative externalities of the distress or failure of such banks from a global perspective — that is, making no distinctions about individual jurisdictions. The broad aim of the G-SIB regime is to:

• reduce the probability of failure of G-SIBs by increasing their ability to absorb losses as a going-concern, by way of a capital surcharge above the Basel III minimum; and
• reduce the impact of failure of G-SIBs by improving global recovery and resolution frameworks. I would note, in passing, that APRA’s current work on living wills draws on this latter initiative.

The additional loss absorbency required for banks determined under the Basel Committee’s methodology to be G-SIBs ranges from one per cent to 2.5 per cent Common Equity Tier 1 (CET1) depending on a bank’s systemic importance, with an empty bucket of 3.5 per cent CET1 as a means of discouraging banks from becoming even more systemically important. The Financial Stability Board announced the initial group of 29 G-SIBs last November and, as we know, no Australian bank was on that list.

The proposed D-SIB framework takes the complementary perspective of the individual jurisdiction. It focuses on the impact that the distress or failure of banks (including international banks) will have on the domestic economy. It recognises that there are many banks that are not significant at the global level but could, if they were to come under stress, have an important impact on their domestic financial system and economy compared to non-systemic institutions.

The Basel Committee has just released a consultative document on its proposed framework for dealing with D-SIBs. The framework is different from the prescriptive approach in the G-SIB framework and, naturally, provides greater scope for national discretion. Hence, there are no agreed ‘buckets’ into which to fit different D-SIBs. Rather, there is a minimum set of 12 principles that would give effect to the requirement that D-SIBs should have higher loss absorbency.

There are three key features of the principles to which I would draw your attention:

• national authorities should establish a methodology for assessing the degree to which banks are systemically important in a domestic context;
• national authorities should publicly disclose information that provides an outline of the methodology employed; and
• the higher loss absorbency requirement imposed on a bank should be commensurate with its systemic importance and should be fully met by CET1.

Until this proposed framework has been subject to consultation and has been endorsed by the G-20 Leaders, there is nothing more I wish to say on the topic of D-SIBs. Other than to note that the consultative document makes the key point that other policy tools, particularly more intensive supervision, can also play an important role in dealing with D-SIBs. APRA could not agree more. Our risk-rating process — what we call our PAIRS/SOARS framework — has been in place since 2002 and is geared towards earlier supervisory intervention for APRA-regulated institutions with higher impact, measured in terms of their balance sheet size.

Basel III liquidity reforms

Alongside its Basel III capital reforms, the Basel Committee in December 2010 released its rules text for a new global liquidity framework, intended to promote stronger liquidity buffers to ensure that banking systems are more resilient to liquidity stresses. The centrepiece of the Basel III liquidity reforms are two new global standards — the Liquidity Coverage Ratio, aimed at strengthening the short-term resilience of banks, and the Net Stable Funding Ratio, aimed at promoting longer-term resilience by requiring banking institutions to fund their activities with more stable sources of funding. The Liquidity Coverage Ratio will be introduced on 1 January 2015 and the Net Stable Funding Ratio from 1 January 2018.

APRA released a discussion paper and draft prudential standard setting out its proposals for implementation of the Basel III liquidity reforms in November 2011.

This new global liquidity framework is, to be sure, an untested one and the Basel Committee is determined to get it right. Hence, the Committee is using the lead-in periods before implementation as observation periods, monitoring the implications of the two standards for financial markets, credit extension and economic growth, and addressing unintended consequences as necessary. Monitoring is covering some general issues, such as the impact of the standards on smaller institutions versus larger and on retail versus wholesale business activities, as well as some specific technical issues, such as the treatment of liquidity lines to non-financial corporates, eligibility criteria for high-quality liquid assets and the treatment of term deposits. Discussions on these technical issues are now an important item on the Committee’s meeting agenda and good progress is being made.

In contrast to the capital reforms, then, the detailed elements of the Basel III liquidity reforms are not yet in place. Inevitably, market concerns about the quality of sovereign debt in some jurisdictions have led to speculation about the direction of these reforms. Ignore the speculation! There is a strong commitment to the new global liquidity framework by global policymakers. And, of course, under the Liquidity Coverage Ratio, liquidity stresses are intended to be addressed as much by extending the maturity of liabilities as by building up high-quality liquid asset portfolios.

This latter point is especially relevant for Australia, which does not have sufficient high-quality liquid assets (particularly sovereign debt) for inclusion in liquidity buffers. As we know, Australia has chosen to adopt an alternative treatment available to it in the new global liquidity framework. Under this treatment, any shortfall between a banking institution’s holdings of high-quality liquid assets and its Liquidity Coverage Ratio requirement will be able to be met through a Committed Liquidity Facility with the Reserve Bank of Australia, for a fee. The availability of such a Facility must, however, be balanced against the overriding objective of the new global liquidity framework of reducing the recourse of banking institutions to their central bank at the first signs of stress. Moral hazard problems can abound in this area as well as with D-SIBs. Accordingly, APRA will want to be assured that banking institutions have taken all reasonable steps towards meeting their Liquidity Coverage Ratio requirements through their own balance sheet management, before relying on the Facility. The lengthening of tenors in wholesale funding that has been taking place is a step in the right direction, but there is further to go.

A final note

No discussion of global banking reform, even introductory remarks, would be complete without acknowledgment that higher quality and quantity of bank capital and liquidity comes at a cost to banking institutions and, potentially, to economic activity. The costs to banks, which are largely private costs, are generally measured in terms of reduced profitability from, on the assets side, holding larger portfolios of lower-income-earning liquid assets and, on the liabilities side, from replacing debt with more expensive equity and lengthening funding profiles. To the extent that banks seek to recoup their reduced profitability through increasing their lending rates, investment and consumption — and consequently output — are lower than they would otherwise be.

The fall in output represents the economic costs of the Basel III reforms.

The economic benefits of the reforms are seen from a longer-term perspective, in the form of higher output that would be enjoyed from a reduction in the frequency and severity of banking crises. The economic benefits of a safe banking system accrue as both private and public benefits. As the world is being painfully reminded, the losses in output during a crisis and in subsequent years are substantial, and some of the losses may be permanent. In the United Kingdom, as just one example, the cumulative loss of output since the crisis began is likely to be at least 25 per cent of annual GDP already, and the eventual loss could be a multiple of this.

The Basel Committee’s comprehensive analysis at the global level of whether the economic benefits of Basel III outweigh the costs found a strong case in the affirmative. APRA is now performing a similar calculus at the domestic level for its Regulation Impact Statement, prior to finalising the Basel III reforms in Australia. The work is nearing completing and we will begin to discuss it publicly soon. Suffice to say that APRA has reached a similar strong conclusion — the economic benefits to the Australian community of a safer banking system clearly outweigh, in our judgment, the economic costs of the reforms.