Compared to more than three decades ago, what is the current leverage ratio of our banks?

Sir, Martin Wolf, in FT on July 12, 2012, in “Seven ways to clean up our banking ‘cesspit’” opined: “Banks need far more equity: In setting these equity requirements, it is essential to recognize that so-called “risk-weighted” assets can and will be gamed by both banks and regulators. As Per Kurowski, a former executive director of the World Bank, reminds me regularly, crises occur when what was thought to be low risk turns out to be very high risk. For this reason, unweighted leverage matters. It needs to be far lower.”Soon a decade since, are bank capital requirements much higher and really sufficient?

No! Though bank capital requirements are mostly needed as a buffer against the certainty of misperceived credit risks & unexpected events, in this uncertain world, these are by far, still mostly based on the certainty of the perceived credit risks.

Consequently, when times are rosy, regulators allow banks: to lend dangerously much to what’s perceived as very safe; to hold much less capital; to do more stock buybacks and to pay more dividends & bonuses. Therefore, banks will stand there naked, when most needed. 

The leverage ratio is also important because it includes as assets, loans to governments at face value, and thereby makes it harder for excessive public bank borrowers to hide behind Basel I’s risk weights of 0% government, 100% citizens. No matter how safe the government might be, those weights de facto imply bureaucrats know better what to do with credit they’re not personally responsible for than e.g., small businesses and entrepreneurs.

November 19, 2004, in a letter you published I wrote: “Our bank supervisors in Basel are unwittingly controlling the capital flows in the world. How many Basel propositions will it take before they start realizing the damage they are doing by favoring so much bank lending to the public sector?” That this factor, in the face of huge government indebtedness, is not even discussed, as I see it can only be explained by too much inbred statism.

Before the Basel Committee Accord became operative in 1988, Basel I, banks were generally required to hold about 10 percent of capital against all assets, meaning a leverage ratio of 10.

Where do banks find themselves now? I know well it’s hard, and extremely time consuming, to make tails and heads out of current bank statements, but I’m absolutely sure most financial media, if they only dared and wanted, have the capacity to extract that information.

Should not such basic/vital data be readily available and perhaps even appear on front pages? It’s not! Why? Has media been silenced by capital minimizing/leverage maximizing dangerously creative financial engineers?

Sir, I’m not picking especially on financial journalists, the silence of the Academia, especially the tenured one, is so much worse.

@PerKurowski