Italy follows Ireland in retaining AFS bond filter

The Banca d'Italia has followed the Central Bank of Ireland in proposing a deviation from Basel III, which would allow domestic banks to exclude some government bond volatility when calculating Tier I capital. The option to ignore the Basel text was granted to national supervisors in the European Union's (EU) version of the rules, but analysts are already warning that doing so will give banks in those jurisdictions an advantage – shielding them from potentially huge falls in bond prices as