Basel II under fire at FDIC conference

ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA – The Basel II implementation plans in the US are costly, onerous and largely ineffectual, but they are the best anyone has come up with. That was the conclusion of a number of speakers at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) banking conference last month, who spoke about the Accord with surprising hostility.

In a presentation entitled Basel II has been a costly distraction on the road to minimising the societal cost of bank failures, George Kaufman of Loyola University, Chicago went on the offensive. "Basel II makes no adjustment for differences in the quality of supervision across different countries, and further to this, there is not a shred of evidence that the new capital measure proposed in the Accord is more meaningful or any better than that achieved by the simpler leverage ratio," he said.

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