LONDON – The international authorities are committed to resisting financial protectionism, a top British regulator told a deposit insurance conference in late October. He was responding to a mounting concern among bankers and other financial market participants that the long-running crisis and the reaction to it among policymakers is leading to market fragmentation and an increasing “home bias.”

NORWALK, Connecticut – America’s accounting rule-making body is already seeking a successor to Leslie Seidman when she retires as chairman of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) in June 2013, Seidman told Accounting Today in October.

LONDON/NORWALK, Connecticut – The world’s top accounting rule-makers, otherwise split over key issues, united in October in welcoming global regulators’ recommendations for enhancing the clarity, comparability and timeliness of the information that banks provide to their investors.

BASEL – Regulators’ plans for introducing a global financial-trade tagging system are on track for launch by March 2013, according to Financial Stability Board (FSB) chairman Mark Carney.

LONDON – Europe’s radical Solvency II safety regime for insurers isn’t likely to come into force until 2016 at the earliest, two years later than the current official start-date, according to industry and regulator sources.

WASHINGTON – A new global federation of insurance industry trade bodies plans to be active in commenting on the growing body of international regulation affecting insurance.

FRANKFURT – All financial regulation must first and foremost be directed at reducing the systemic risks arising from the fact that individual financial institutions do not face the full social cost of their actions, according to top economic advisor Stephen Cecchetti.

TOKYO – Adair Turner, chairman of the Financial Services Authority (FSA), Britain’s financial watchdog, has admitted that regulators “made a mistake” when they moved bank capital regulation from the Basel I regime to Basel II, in 2007-08, without maintaining minimum risk weights for assets. The riskiness of a bank’s assets determines how much safety capital it must hold under the international prudential standards set by the Basel Committee.

LONDON – Higher regulatory capital requirements are the key driver of deleveraging among Europe’s banks, according to a new survey. And, over two-thirds of survey respondents expect deleveraging will take at least a further five years to complete.

Problems seen down the road as EU pushes for periodic audit firm rotation, while US still strongly resists the idea