A few weeks ago,I had the pleasure of presenting at AFP’s annual conference in Boston. The topic was how FinReg (Basel III and Dodd-Frank) is impacting banks –and how those effects are trickling down to corporate customers. The thesis is pretty straightforward:In an effort to head off future bank failures,FinReg will [...]
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Banks are continuing to tick people off. Lately,the complaints have centered on two things:the monthly fees that some banks are planning to charge for using the debit cards they were so anxious to give everyone and the recent stories that some banks are charging fees to allow people to deposit money. The New [...] In recent weeks,the battle between bankers and regulators that had been taking place behind the scenes,started to spill out into public view. The reason seems clear:for all of the lobbying they’ve done,banks have been unsuccessful (so far) in weakening the major provisions of Basel III and Dodd-Frank. To quickly refresh:Regulators [...] Last week,the New York Times ran a series of short op-eds in the “Room for Debate”section entitled,“Are Global Banking Rules ‘Anti-American’?”–a reference to the now famous reported run-in between JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon and Mark Carney,Governor of the Bank of Canada,about Basel III –the pending package of rules [...] Yesterday,the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) finalized plans to move forward with an additional capital surcharge on what they call,global systemically important banks (G-SIBs),and what others have been calling systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs). Regardless of what you call these large banks,the vote yesterday to move forward with this additional [...] In yesterday’s New York Times,Joe Nocera writes that “what is killing the economy is lack of credit.”He backs up his argument by referencing a presentation done by Northern Trust economist Paul Kasriel that asserts the same belief. The article and the presentation are both interesting and worth checking out,but rather than refute [...] A few months ago,Daniel Tarullo,a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors,gave a speech entitled Regulating Systemically Important Financial Firms,where he laid out the argument for requiring the largest banks,the so-called SIFIs,to hold an additional layer of capital. It received a fair amount of notice at the time,[...] On Monday,Jamie Dimon caused a bit of a kerfuffle during an interview with the Financial Times when he suggested that the stronger Basel regulations were “blatantly anti-American.”What was most puzzling to me when I heard the news was that,in the past,Dimon has been either supportive of increased regulatory requirements or,at [...] Bank of America can’t seem to get itself out of the news. In this morning’s Wall Street Journal,there’s a story that the Fed has asked BofA for contingency plans in case conditions continue to worsen. It’s an interesting article,but for me,BofA’s issues point to a larger,more interesting issue than whether or [...] Last week,the Federal Reserve,the FDIC,and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) released the interagency Shared National Credits (SNC) Review for 2011. Better known to bankers as the “snick”report,the review provides a high level overview of the credit quality of syndicated loans that are at least $20mm in [...] | |||||
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