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Global rules on banking approved
212-621-1500Associated Press
The Associated Press
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‘Britain needs low interest rates'
LONDON — Prime Minister David Cameron predicts a difficult year for the British economy that will require maintaining the mix of low interest rates and budget-deficit reduction.
“It's a tough economic environment we're in,” Cameron said Sunday on the “Andrew Marr Show” on the BBC. “Right now, Britain needs low interest rates.”
Cameron indicated in a Sunday Telegraph interview that he would like to stay in office seven more years, even as an opinion poll suggested his Conservative Party will lose power in 2015. To keep borrowing costs down, the coalition government must sustain a “credible strategy” for controlling the budget deficit, he said Sunday.
“The top of the list of worries is making sure you continue to have credibility for the deficit reduction strategy,” Cameron said. “That's the key.”
— Bloomberg News
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By The Associated Press
Published: Sunday, January 6, 2013, 6:44 p.m.
Updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2013
BERLIN — International banking regulators agreed on Sunday to global rules meant to ensure that banks keep enough cash on hand to survive market crises. Banks were given until 2019 to comply fully.
The rules will require banks to hold enough cash, and assets such as equities, corporate and government bonds that can easily be sold, to tide them over during an acute 30-day crisis.
The body that oversees the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, which sets international rules, said they will have to hold 60 percent of that amount when the rules start being phased in on Jan. 1, 2015; that will increase by 10 percentage points every year until the standards take full effect at the beginning of 2019.
The oversight body's head, Bank of England governor Mervyn King, said after regulators met in Basel, Switzerland, that the timeframe ensures the new standards “will in no way hinder the ability of the global banking system to finance the recovery.” The hope is that it will prevent lenders from becoming over-reliant on help from central banks, which have stepped in during recent years to keep the financial system flush with cash.
King said that “the vast majority” of the world's biggest banks “already hold liquid assets well above the minimum required by this standard.”
The rules are part of wider efforts to prevent another shock to the financial system such as that prompted by Lehman Brothers' 2008 collapse, which led to taxpayer-funded bailouts of banks in the United States and Europe.
They are part of the so-called Basel III package of reforms. That package will require lenders to increase their highest-quality capital — such as equity and cash reserves — gradually from 2 percent of the risky assets they hold to 7 percent by 2019.
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