Dombret: "We will stay at the negotiating table" Bundesbank Symposium on banking supervision 2017
Bundesbank Executive Board member Andreas Dombret has called for negotiations with the United States over the scheduled revision of the capital rules for banks (Basel III) to continue. "As far as the Bundesbank is concerned, we will stay at the negotiating table and are always ready to stake out common ground,"
he said at the Bundesbank symposium on banking supervision in Frankfurt am Main. The pace of negotiations isn’t decisive, he said; it’s the outcome that counts. "If the Americans do not implement the Basel III framework, we Europeans will certainly not introduce the new rules unilaterally,"
he added, explaining that it would be wrong to reach an agreement at any price – any compromise would need to be palatable to everyone concerned.
Don’t set the hurdles too high
Mr Dombret said he felt that any output floor needed to calibrated carefully, remarking that "setting too high a hurdle quite simply creates the wrong incentives. After all, there are good reasons why model calculations are designed such that higher risks require more capital, and lower risks less."
The Bundesbank, he stressed, would therefore stick to its position in negotiations that any output floor should not be too high. The Bundesbank Executive Board member continued by noting that a robust line of defence is already in place today, in the shape of the leverage ratio, which sets additional minimum capital requirements to prevent internal models from being abused by those looking to understate the capital they need to set aside.
Look ahead
Turning to the impact of Basel III, Mr Dombret said that, for the bulk of German institutions, the standards are manageable, with capital requirements increasing for most institutions by less than 5% on average. He reported that savings banks and cooperative banks in particular will barely be affected by the new rules or will even benefit from Basel III to an extent. "So the sense of panic observed in some quarters is no longer warranted,"
he reasoned. "It’s time critics came down from their barricades over Basel III and started to look ahead."
Improve resilience
Wrong to compromise at any price