Timetable differences on Basel II are said to be hindering progress on home-host issues. Some banks are accused of making home-host issues a scapegoat. David Keefe reports

The shortly expected publication by US regulators of their delayed final plans for implementing Basel II should alleviate some of the worry associated with current concerns, including the basis for floor calculations, Comptroller of the US Currency John Dugan said in March at the IIB conference.

A US legislative initiative to regulate rating agencies is looking more likely. Growing support shown at House hearings

Arthur Levitt, the SEC’s longest serving chairman, tells Oonagh Leighton why the 2002 corporate governance Act remains vital. Standards should not be relaxed for small companies.

There is a continuous trade-off between a desirable convergence of supervisory practice in Europe, and imposing excessively burdensome detail and prescription on banks. Today, there is a feeling that CEBS (the Committee of European Banking Supervisors) is moving too far towards prescription and burdensome detail, says Freddy Van den Spiegel, director for public affairs at the Benelux insurance and banking group Fortis, and chairman of CEBS’ consultative panel.

LONDON – Britain’s financial regulator, the Financial Services Authority (FSA), intends to pull back from some of its previous plans to ‘gold plate’ the EU’s Capital Requirements Directive. This is revealed in the FSA’s latest consultative paper on the directive’s implementation, published at the end of February.*

LONDON – Highly provisional results from the latest test run of the new Basel capital rules indicate that the capital of participating banks from the leading industrialised countries could show an overall fall of between 6% and 8% under the new regime, according to a senior EU official.

NEW YORK – As participants in the booming credit derivatives market report big strides in cutting the backlog of outstanding confirmations, market leaders are promising to continue cleaning up and streamlining back-office practices. Following a second meeting between regulators and the 14 major US and European firms in the credit derivatives (CD) market at the New York Federal Reserve Bank, on February 16, the firms have jointly written to Tim Geithner, NY Fed president, setting out how they intend to maintain progress in reaching their clean-up targets by the October 31 deadline.

BASEL, Switzerland – The emergence of banks with over a trillion dollars in assets and a large share of national deposits could overwhelm “the clubby approach to financial regulation” built up by the international Basel capital accords on bank safety, says a leading academic.

VENICE, Italy - The HBOS banking group, Britain’s top mortgage lender and one of Europe’s largest issuers in the securitisation market, believes its funding strategy could change under the risk weighting rules of the Basel II bank safety rules.