Basel Accords

The Basel Accords refer to the banking supervision Accords (recommendations on banking regulations)—Basel I, Basel II and Basel III—issued by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS). They are called the Basel Accords as the BCBS maintains its secretariat at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland and the committee normally meets there.

Basel I is the round of deliberations by central bankers from around the world, and in 1988, the Basel Committee (BCBS) in Basel, Switzerland, published a set of minimum capital requirements for banks. This is also known as the 1988 Basel Accord, and was enforced by law in the Group of Ten (G-10) countries in 1992. Basel I is now widely viewed as outmoded. Indeed, the world has changed as financial conglomerates, financial innovation and risk management have developed.
Basel I, that is, the 1988 Basel Accord, primarily focused on credit risk. Assets of banks were classified and grouped in five categories according to credit risk, carrying risk weights of zero (for example home country sovereign debt), ten, twenty, fifty, and up to one hundred percent (this category has, as an example, most corporate debt). Banks with international presence are required to hold capital equal to 8% of the risk-weighted assets. The creation of the credit default swap after the Exxon Valdez incident helped large banks hedge lending risk and allowed banks to lower their own risk to lessen the burden of these onerous restrictions.

Since 1988, this framework has been progressively introduced in member countries of G-10, currently comprising 13 countries, namely, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and the United States of America. Most other countries, currently numbering over 100, have also adopted, at least in name, the principles prescribed under Basel I. The efficacy with which the principles are enforced varies, even within nations of the Group.

Basel II is the second of the Basel Accords, (now extended and effectively superseded by Basel III), which are recommendations on banking laws and regulations issued by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision.

Basel II, initially published in June 2004, was intended to create an international standard for banking regulators to control how much capital banks need to put aside to guard against the types of financial and operational risks banks (and the whole economy) face. One focus was to maintain sufficient consistency of regulations so that this does not become a source of competitive inequality amongst internationally active banks. Advocates of Basel II believed that such an international standard could help protect the international financial system from the types of problems that might arise should a major bank or a series of banks collapse. In theory, Basel II attempted to accomplish this by setting up risk and capital management requirements designed to ensure that a bank has adequate capital for the risk the bank exposes itself to through its lending and investment practices. Generally speaking, these rules mean that the greater risk to which the bank is exposed, the greater the amount of capital the bank needs to hold to safeguard its solvency and overall economic stability.
Politically, it was difficult to implement Basel II in the regulatory environment prior to 2008, and progress was generally slow until that year’s major banking crisis caused mostly by credit default swaps, mortgage-backed security markets and similar derivatives. As Basel III was negotiated, this was top of mind, and accordingly much more stringent standards were contemplated, and quickly adopted in some key countries including the USA.

The final version aims at:

1. Ensuring that capital allocation is more risk sensitive;
2. Enhance disclosure requirements which will allow market participants to assess the capital adequacy of an institution;
3. Ensuring that credit risk, operational risk and market risk are quantified based on data and formal techniques;
4. Attempting to align economic and regulatory capital more closely to reduce the scope for regulatory arbitrage.

Basel III (or the Third Basel Accord) is a global regulatory standard on bank capital adequacy, stress testing and market liquidity risk agreed upon by the members of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision in 2010–11, and scheduled to be introduced from 2013 until 2018.

The third instalment of the Basel Accords was developed in response to the deficiencies in financial regulation revealed by the late-2000s financial crisis. Basel III strengthens bank capital requirements and introduces new regulatory requirements on bank liquidity and bank leverage. The OECD estimates that the implementation of Basel III will decrease annual GDP growth by 0.05–0.15%. Critics suggest that greater regulation is responsible for the slow recovery from the late-2000s financial crisis, and that the Basel III requirements will increase the incentives of banks to game the regulatory framework and further negatively affect the stability of the financial system.