WASHINGTON – The present value of the cumulative US economic output losses stemming from the 2007-2009 financial crisis could exceed $13 trillion, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the non-partisan Congressional watchdog.

ZURICH – A move by the Swiss National Bank to activate the counter-cyclical capital buffer (CCB), an innovative part of the Basel III framework, has been approved by the nation's governing Federal Council in Bern. This is the first time that the CCB has been used since the Basel III bank capital and liquidity rules began to be implemented by countries around the world at the start of 2013.

LONDON – Further confirmation of “material differences” in the way banks calculate the safety capital they need to hold against potential losses emerges from a study undertaken by the European Banking Authority (EBA), the London-based pan-EU supervision body.

Basel, Switzerland, February 26 – Reverting to simpler measures of risk won’t necessarily result in comparable measures of a bank’s capacity to absorb risks, according to top international regulator Wayne Byres.

LONDON, February 18 (Global Risk Regulator) – Global banking regulators are taking aim at the way banks use different historical time periods when calculating Value-at Risk (VAR), the crucial component for determining trading book capital requirements, according to UK press reports. Some banks use one year of data, others look as far back as five years and as a result tend to have higher regulatory capital requirements because their models include wild market swings from the 2008 financial crisis, the Financial Times newspaper said today. The Basel Committee of banking supervisors wants to standardise the period in banks’ models to somewhere between two and five years of data, although nothing has been finalised, the FT said. The Committee, which sets international banking standards, was embarrassed last month by the results of its own study which revealed wide variations in the level of capital held by different banks against trading exposures with the same risk (See “Basel to curb banks’ risk models after shock study” in GRR newsletter for February 2013).

Bank models are causing big disparities in their capital levels, but gold-plated rules are also to blame. Regulators determined to fix the mess By Melvyn Westlake

Proposals for tackling a shortage of long-term growth capital are set out in a new report. They include making regulation more supportive

With standard-setters split over impaired loans, banking supervisors look to take matters into their own hands By David Keefe

Asia-Pacific banks poised to take global lead A large majority of banks in the Asia-Pacific region are well placed to start implementing the Basel III capital reforms. Many have already done so. Others are set to introduce the new rules within the next few weeks, according to the credit rating agencies.

A selection of news items generated by the American regulatory reform agenda