Basel III: kill or be killed

The financial crisis has hit the global economy hard. In the US, GDP shrank by 2.4% in 2009, with 14.7 million Americans out of work by the end of the year – double the number unemployed at the end of 2007. To prevent a repeat, leaders of the Group of 20 (G-20) nations want banks to take less risk and hold more capital, and have given the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision the job of coming up with new rules. The problem with the first iteration of those regulations, banks claim, is they