Reuters: Regulatory News: EU's Barnier warns U.S. over 'radical' new bank rule

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EU's Barnier warns U.S. over 'radical' new bank rule Apr 22nd 2013, 19:05 By Douwe Miedema WASHINGTON, April 22 | Mon Apr 22, 2013 3:05pm EDT WASHINGTON, April 22 (Reuters) - A U.S. plan to force foreign banks to hold far more capital could sow discord among supervisors and lead to retaliation from abroad, European Union financial services czar Michel Barnier said on Monday. It was the second time in less than a week that EU misgivings about Washington's aggressive stance in applying domestic rules on foreign banks became public. "The (rule) would seem to represent a radical departure from the existing U.S. policy on consolidated supervision of (foreign banks)," Barnier said in a letter to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, dated April 18. "(It) may frustrate the efforts to ensure a consistent implementation of the Basel III standards across jurisdictions," Barnier also said, referring to a global accord on the maximum amount of money banks can borrow. Politicians across the world cracked down on risky bank practices in 2009 after the financial crisis, but many of the rules are still not complete years later, and countries are haggling about a rising number of issues. The Fed in December launched a plan that would force foreign banks to hold as much capital as U.S. banks, regardless of how their overseas parent companies are funded. The Fed did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The measure could be particularly costly for Deutsche Bank , Germany's flagship lender, and to a lesser degree for the UK's Barclays, because of the corporate structure of these two European banks. The plan, authored by Fed Governor Daniel Tarullo, would be a breach with a U.S. tradition of relying on foreign supervisors to watch overseas banks and allowing them to hold less equity in America than their domestic counterparts. In a separate April 18 letter, Barnier and a host of other international regulators have also complained about U.S. rules for derivatives regulation to U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. The U.S. derivatives regulator wants foreign banks to stick to the same rules for trading swaps as U.S. firms, but other countries are urging it to rely more on the rules abroad, with international negotiations ongoing. The pressure from Barnier came ahead of a meeting of the G20 most powerful economies of the world this weekend, which touched on certain financial regulation issues, such as the reform of financial benchmarks. The EU and the United States want to include the financial services sector in a free trade agreement they are hammering out, but this would take several years to complete, and any issues now need to be resolved separately. Link this Share this Digg this Email Reprints

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