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

Regulators are keeping silent about how they intend applying rules outside the US; worried bankers back bi-partisan Bill

WASHINGTON – “This is a critical year for financial reform,” US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told journalists in early February. “In 2012,” he said, “we expect to put in place key elements of the new framework of safeguards for the financial system. And we expect this year to make progress building the foundations of reforms to the housing finance system.”

LONDON – The risk of another global recession and a renewed banking crisis is now the number one concern, according to a new survey of the various perceived dangers currently facing the world’s banking industry. The survey, published at the end of January, is the latest in the annual Banana Skins series produced by the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation, a London think-tank, in association with the professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.

LONDON – The European Banking Authority (EBA), the pan-EU supervisory body, announced in early February that its preliminary assessment suggested the bloc’s largest banks can, on aggregate, meet the temporary 9% capital target without having a negative impact on lending to the real economy.

MOSCOW – Accounting standard-setters have made it clear to the US that a continued programme of “convergence by another name” is not an acceptable way forward to achieving the single set of global rules sought by world leaders, the world’s top accounting rule-maker said in January.

LONDON – An appeal to EU politicians and regulators to allow national supervisors sufficient flexibility to customise capital and liquidity rules for their own banks was made in early February by the head of the Financial Services Authority (FSA), Britain’s financial markets watchdog.

WASHINGTON – Credit rating agencies’ opinions do have an impact on the cost of funding for sovereign issuers, and consequently ratings are a concern for financial stability. That is one of the conclusions of a study undertaken by economists at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the multilateral agency that monitors global economic developments.

BASEL – Humankind’s ability to see and hear only what it wants to see and hear is the major impediment to improving the acknowledged poor performance of the stress-testing of groups of financial firms with the potential to damage the wider economy, according to leading researchers.

NEW YORK – Former Basel Committee top staffer Stefan Walter headed a list of financial regulators heading for professional services firms in February, underlining the continuing drain of talent from regulatory bodies to generally much better rewarded private sector jobs.