Banks continue to lobby for weaker financial regulation: capital requirements are excessive, liquidity requirements are overly restrictive, and stress tests are too burdensome. Yes, in the aftermath of the 2007-09 financial crisis, we needed reforms, they say, but Basel III and Dodd-Frank have gone too far.

Unfortunately, these complaints are finding sympathetic ears in a variety of places. U.S. authorities are considering changes that would water down existing standards. In Europe, news is not promising either. These developments are not only discouraging, but they are self-defeating. Higher capital clearly improves resilience. And, at current levels of capitalization, it does not limit banks’ ability to support economic activity.

As it turns out, on this particular subject, there may be less of a discrepancy between private and social interests than is commonly believed. The reason is that investors reward banks in jurisdictions where regulators and supervisors promote social welfare through tougher capital standards....

Ensuring Stress Tests Remain Effective

Last month, the Federal Reserve Board published proposed refinements to its annual Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR) exercise—the supervisory stress test that evaluates the capital adequacy of the largest U.S. banks (34 in the 2017 test). In our view, the Federal Reserve has an effective framework for carrying out these all-important stress tests. Having started in 2011, the Fed is now embarking on only the seventh CCAR exercise. That means that everyone is still learning how to best structure and execute the tests. The December proposals are clearly in this spirit.

With this same goal in mind, we make the following proposals for enhancing the stress tests and preserving their effectiveness:

--- Change the scenarios more aggressively and unexpectedly, continuing to disclose them only after banks’ exposures are fixed.
--- Introduce an experimental scenario (that will not be used in “grading” the bank’s relative performance or capital plans) to assess the implications of events outside of historical experience and to probe for weaknesses in the system.
--- As a way to evaluate banks’ internal models, require publication of loss rates or risk-weighted assets for the same hypothetical portfolios for which the Fed is disclosing its estimates.
--- Stick with the annual CCAR cycle....

Steve Cecchetti and Kim SchoenholtzJanuary 22, 2018Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review, CCAR, Federal Reserve, Prudential regulation, Stress test, Scenarios, Capital requirements, Transparency, Flexibility, Severity, Hypothetical portfolio exercise, GSEs, OFHEO, Risk-weighted assets, Procyclical, ABCP, Asset-backed commercial paper, DFAST

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Money, Banking, and Financial Markets