Tracking the U.S. Banking Industry
The New York Fed has recently published the first edition of a new quarterly report tracking the aggregate financial condition of consolidated U.S. banking organizations. In this post, we describe the methodology used to construct the statistics in the report as well as present and briefly discuss some of the findings.
The Dominant Role of Banks in Asset Securitization
As the previous posts have discussed, financial intermediation has evolved over the last few decades toward shadow banking.
Introducing a Series on the Evolution of Banks and Financial Intermediation
It used to be simple: Asked how to describe financial intermediation, you would just mention the word “bank.”
How Were the Basel 3 Minimum Capital Requirements Calibrated?
One way to reduce the likelihood of bank failures is to require banks to hold more and better capital. But how much capital is enough? An international committee of regulators recently reached a new agreement (called Basel 3) to impose new, higher standards for capital on globally active banks. The Basel 3 common equity minimum capital requirement will be 4.5 percent plus an additional buffer of at least 2.5 percent of risk-weighted assets (RWA). Are these numbers big or small—and where did they come from? In this post, I describe how the new Basel capital standards were calibrated.