Gold: Solution to the Banking Crisis

sprott.com / By Eric Sprott & David Baker
The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision is an exclusive and somewhat mysterious entity that issues banking guidelines for the world’s largest financial institutions. It is part of the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) and is often referred to as the Central Banks’ central bank. Ever since the financial meltdown four years ago, the Basel Committee has been hard at work devising new international regulatory rules designed to minimize the potential for another large-scale financial meltdown. The Committee’s latest ‘framework’, as they call it, is referred to as “Basel III”, and involves tougher capital rules that will force all banks to more than triple the amount of core capital they hold from 2% to 7% in order to avoid future taxpayer bailouts. It doesn’t sound like much of an increase, and according to the Basel group’s own survey, the 100 largest global banks will only require approximately €370 billion in additional reserves to comply with the new regulations by 2019.¹ Given that the Spanish banks alone are believed to need well over €100 billion today simply to keep their capital ratios in check, it is hard to believe €370 billion will be enough protect the world’s “too-big-to-fail” banks from future crises, but it is indeed a step in the right direction.²

Initial implementation of Basel III’s capital rules was expected to come into effect on January 1, 2013, but US banking regulators issued a press release on November 9th stating that they wouldn’t meet the deadline, citing a large volume of letters (ie. complaints) received from bank participants and a “wide range of views expressed during the comment period”.³ It has also been revealed that smaller US regional banks are loath to adopt the new rules, which they view as overly complicated and potentially devastating to their bottom lines. The Independent Community Bankers of America has even requested a Basel III exemption for all banks with less than $50 billion in assets,“in order to avoid large-scale industry concentration that would curtail credit for consumers and business borrowers, especially in small communities.”⁴ The long-term implementation period for all Basel III measures actually extends to 2019, so the delays are not necessarily meaningful news, but they do illustrate the growing rift between the US banking cartel and its European counterpart regarding the Basel III framework. JP Morgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon is on record having referred to Basel III regulations as “un-American” for their favourable treatment of European covered bonds over US mortgage-backed securities.⁵ Readers may also remember when Dimon was caught yelling at Mark Carney, Canada’s (soon to be former) Central Bank Governor and head of the Financial Stability Board, during a meeting in Washington to discuss the same topic.⁶ More recently, Deutsche Bank’s co-chief executive Juergen Fitschen suggested that the US regulators’ delay was “hurting trans-Atlantic relations” and creating distrust… stating, “when the whole thing is called un-American, I can only say in disbelief, who can still believe in this day and age that there can be purely European or American rules.”⁷ Suffice it to say that Basel III implementation has not gone as smoothly as planned.
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