Europe, America, G20, don’t walk away from Basel Committee risk weighted bank capital regulations…you’d better run!

Sir, John Dizard writes about a “meeting of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision on November 28 and 29… is scheduled to agree a “standardised approach for credit risk” and impose limits on the use of internal models. The idea is that banks in the G20 countries, a group of the world’s most powerful economies, will not engage in regulatory arbitrage, or international game playing that results in a lowering of credit standards.” “Basel’s background noise for the next crisis”, FTfm, November 7.

Of course, the Basel Committee should prohibit banks from using their own models to define their own capital requirements; allowing it, is like letting children use their own nutrition models to pick between chocolate cake, ice cream, broccoli or spinach.

But, to impose a regulators’ defined “standardised approach for credit risk”, is just as loony; it suffices to have a look at what the standardized risk weights included in previous Basel Committee regulations.

One example: Basel II, 2004, set the risk weight for an asset rated AAA to AA at 20% while that of an asset rated below BB- was set at 150%. Anyone believing that what is rated as highly speculative, almost bankrupt, below BB-, is more dangerous to the bank system than what is rated AAA to AA, must be smoking some weird stuff.

Sir, unfortunately Dizard, as most of you in FT, shows little understanding for the whole issue when he questions: “under the current version of the Basel “standardised approach”, unsecured lending to a non-public, below investment-grade corporate borrower requires the same bank capital commitment as project financing secured by assets, liens on equity and cash lockbox arrangements. Based on the past low loss rates for project lending, that is between two and three times as much capital as the risk should require.”

If that is so, should not the difference in risk reflect itself sufficiently in the interest rate and the size of exposures? Why should that same perceived risk also have to be reflected in the capital? Does Dizard (or you Sir) not know that any risk, even if perfectly perceived, leads to the wrong decision if excessively considered?

Sir, ask Dizard: “Why should a bank when lending to a below investment-grade corporate borrower have to hold more capital than when lending to “safe” projects? Will not the “risky” corporate anyhow get less credit and pay higher risk premiums than the “safe” project? 

Sir, again, for the umpteenth time, bank capital should not be required to cover for expected risks; it should be there to cover for the unexpected.

Sir, again, for the umpteenth time, the risk weighted capital requirements for banks have introduced absolutely insane distortions in the allocation of credit to the real economy. If Europe, America, G20, or the whole world do not run away from the regulators’ senseless doubling down on ex ante perceived risk, their economies are doomed to stall and fall.

@PerKurowski