European regulators should let banks bank

There’s a conflict brewing in Europe between regulators, banks and some politicians over how new Basel III-compliant rules will be framed. Several banks, as well as policymakers in countries including France and Germany, say the capital requirements called for under the new regulations are too high. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision thinks that these last-ditch efforts to weaken Basel III’s implementation, due to be phased in from 2023, are “highly unfortunate and extremely bad timing.”
This debate might seem easy to resolve: The regulators are right, surely? Not a lot was learned from the 2008 financial crisis, but one lesson was that higher capital requirements are a much-needed buffer. In this case, however, the regulators are wrong and the bankers are right — though not for the reasons you’d think.
European banks are worried that the new standards, which will increase capital requirements on average by 19%, will crimp lending. (German and Danish banks, which would need more than 35% extra capital, are particularly worried.) They also want to be able to use their own internal models for risk. Regulators such as Francois Villeroy of the French central bank say that the fact that bank lending rose during the pandemic shows that lending won’t be hit. This is an odd argument, given that in spite of unprecedented central bank support, banks have tightened credit standards so much that Europe’s recovery is threatened. In the United States, too, the data shows that Treasury-bolstered loans under the Paycheck Protection Program are what’s driving lending growth.
Banks’ complaints about constraints on lending should be taken seriously. Good policy is made when decision-makers responsible for two sets of risks balance them out. The Basel Committee is tasked only with avoiding one set of risks, the macro-prudential sort. Its recommendations need to be re-examined by those who also recognise the threat that lower lending would pose — and who are responsible for the unintended consequences of excessively restrictive regulation.
Those consequences can be stark, and not just for Europe. Longer-maturity project financing, for example, has dried up thanks to post-2008 regulations, with dire consequences for infrastructure globally. Emerging countries such as India have been particularly hurt. Prior to 2008, European savers were helping boost emerging-market growth and getting a reasonable return for their effort. Since 2008, European savings have largely been stuck earning low — or negative — domestic returns, and developing nations have had to do without their help. Private financing of infrastructure had collapsed even before the pandemic halved it to $46 billion. (It was about $200 billion in 2012.) When trans-national project finance did not cause the 2008 crisis, why did post-crisis regulations shut it down? Who should be held responsible for this unintended consequence of Basel III?
Clearly, the supervisors in Basel don’t care about such unintended consequences, nor do central bankers. It isn’t their job to care. But banks do and, if politicians care about savers, they should pay heed. Generals fight the last war and regulators fight the last crisis. We are no longer living in a world endangered by gung-ho lending. Rather, it’s a world in which risk-taking is weighed down by enormous central bank balance sheets.

—Bloomberg