Despite revisions to bank capital standards, fundamental shortcomings remain: the rules for setting capital requirements need to be simpler, and resolution should be an essential part of the capital requirement framework.We propose a new system of capital regulation that addresses these needs by...

This staff report on United Kingdom’s (UK) 2013 Article IV Consultation highlights economic policies and development. The UK economy grew by about ¼ percent in 2012. Net trade reduced growth by 0.6 percentage points of GDP, the biggest drag since 2005, and well above staff projections....

This Financial Sector Stability Assessment on Nigeria discusses the macroeconomic performance and structure of the financial system. Although Nigerian economy experienced both domestic and external shocks in recent years, the economy continued to grow rapidly, achieving more than 7 percent...

Several recent studies have recommended greater reliance on subordinated debt as a tool to discipline bank risk taking. Some of these proposals recommend using sub-debt yield spreads as triggers for supervisory discipline under prompt corrective action (PCA). Currently such action is prompted by...

In recent years there has been a growing realization that there are significant problems with the current bank risk-based capital guidelines. As financial firms have become more sophisticated and complex they have effectively arbitraged the existing capital requirements. They have become so good...

Although financial instruments that, in effect, permit corporations to treat preferred stock dividends as tax-deductible interest have been used by nonfinancial corporations since late 1993, bank holding companies (BHCs) did not issue these trust-preferred securities (TPS) until 1996, when the...

Several recent proposals aim to restore market discipline to the banking sector by forcing banks to issue debt that is not guaranteed by the government, termed subordinated debt. This Commentary examines the reasoning behind such proposals and assesses the likelihood of their success.

This paper studies bank capital regulation under deposit insurance when bank attributes and actions are private information. Banks are heterogeneous in quality and choose both the mean and variance of their investment strategy. Regulatory tools include capital regulation and state-contingent...

The conference "Financial services at the crossroads: capital regulation in the twenty-first century," held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on February 26-27, 1998, was designed to encourage a consensus between the public and private sectors on an agenda for capital regulation in the new...