Basel II under hostile fire at FDIC conference

Basel II may be imperfect, expensive and a burden, but is the only solution available to the financial institutions, according to a number of speakers at the conference.

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 minimizing the societal cost of bank failures, George Kaufman of Loyola University Chicago went on