The challenges of the leverage ratio

Published on February 29, 2016   11 min

A selection of talks on Finance, Accounting & Economics

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I'm Simon Samuels. I'm a Banking Consultant having spent the last quarter of the century analyzing the European banking industry from an equity investor's perspective. And I'm going to talk about the challenges of the leverage ratio.
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Most major banking systems are essentially shaped by the regulatory framework in which they operate. And one of the features of the banking system before the onset of the financial crisis was that the banking system, particularly in Europe, was huge. Banks in countries like Iceland, Ireland, Switzerland, and the UK, with four, five, six, seven, seven, eight times the size of the underlying economies in which they operated. Whereas by contrast, banking systems in the United States and other countries were dramatically smaller. One of the biggest drivers of that difference is the regulatory framework. Put very simply, banks, typically in Europe, didn't really care about their total assets. They were very much focused on their, so called, risk-weighted assets, that is their assets adjusted for the different perceived levels of risk. That was what the regulators, their managements, their shareholders were primarily focused about. And so the fact that the European banks have enormous balance sheets essentially was of little concern. By contrast, the regulatory framework of banks in the United States was one that was primarily about the overall size of the balance sheet, the total assets. So U.S. banks essentially cared about their balance sheets, total assets, and didn't really care about the risk-weighted asset equivalents, whereas the banking system in Europe was essentially the opposite. And one of the consequences of this is that the financial architecture in these two countries grew up very, very differently.

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