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’China gets shorty
In his latest move to support the development of China’s capital markets, Guo Shuqing, the newly installed head of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, will oversee the creation of a new body to control facilitate short-selling.
Shorting bans aren’t much use
Nothing surprising here…
… move along please.
Curious crisis meeting du jour
Scheduled for Tuesday actually:
That’s South Korea’s financial regulator announcing a conference call with Chinese and Japanese peers, regarding (if we translate it right) “American and European financial health”
Liquidity lessons
Two pertinent ones, via London Banker:
Liquidity means you can generate cash from a physical asset or paper claim.
If you can’t exchange the asset for a major currency to meet a sudden funding need,
The Tobin tax lives on – part two
Yesterday the Merkozy plan for a Financial Transaction Tax caused some hefty damage for London-listed exchanges and brokers.
Not a surprise really. The analysts at Adam Smith Institute were hopping mad on Thursday:
What’s inside Pandora’s box – redux
Why, it’s an investigation.
RTRS-DANISH FSA SAYS TO REPORT NORDEA BANK DENMARK TO POLICE IN CONNECTION WITH INVESTMENT ANALYSIS ON PANDORA
RTRS-DANISH FSA SAYS NORDEA BANK DENMARK FAILED TO INFORM ABOUT ITS FINANCIAL INTEREST IN PANDORA IN CONNECTION WITH AN INVESTMENT ANALYSIS
Along with Goldman Sachs,
Short-selling fairies
Charts via short-selling information specialists Data Explorers, incorporating a gauge of securities lending in both the financials currently subject to the short-selling bans, and in their markets.
Compare and contrast:
Carnage with Consob
Earlier on Monday — Italy’s financial regulator hits the shorts:
Later on Monday:
(Oh and trading in Unicredit has already gone through one suspension.)
Brussels, not Basel
Also: why ‘maximum harmonisation’ might end up getting someone’s Vickers in a twist.
An odd bump in Lloyds and Barclays on Monday:
It’s probably helped by a great note doing the rounds from Citigroup banking analyst Ronit Ghose,
The where and what of regulatory arbitrage
Get the little flags at the ready: on Tuesday JP Morgan Cazenove published the final installment of its trio of reports on regulatory arbitrage.
It is stirring patriotic sentiment up on Capitol Hill,
The FSA is concerned about ETFs
The UK financial regulator the FSA appears (finally) to be on to the complexity issue that has been affecting the ETF industry for a long while now.
From the FSA’s ‘Retail Conduct Risk Outlook 2011″
Value for money, with the FSA
The Financial Services Authority (FSA) has today announced its proposed Annual Funding Requirement (AFR) for 2011/12. The AFR for 2011/12 is £500.5m, up from £454.7m in 2010/11, a gross increase of 10.1% in overall funding.
Basel liquidity rules, going neo-medieval
Can we talk a bit more about the scandal of Basel III allowing banks to give government bonds a zero risk weighting on their books? This time regarding Basel’s liquidity rules.
Actually, can we talk about the related global shortage of AAA-rated assets and what that means for sovereign debt as well?
Buried in recent regulations on Basel’s liquidity coverage ratio,
Hedge funds, Singapore and why Tokyo is hollowing out (again) [corrected]
Update: Goldman called us on Tuesday to correct a few key facts about its annual Tokyo gabfest, held last week. Our report below was based on attendance at some speaker sessions and a social gathering.
What’s going on inside the FSA?
Well, this is worrying. When even Britain’s Financial Services Authority acknowledges its own personnel problems, it must be serious.
From a memorandum the FSA recently sent to the Treasury Select Committee,
SEC charges State Street employees
The SEC has charged two employees of State Street with misleading investors over their subprime exposure.
According to the SEC order, John Flannery and James Hopkins marketed a fund that was mostly invested in RMBS as an alternative to a money market fund.
The spirit is willing, but the banks are weak
“We need to … recognise, that in finance and economics, ill-designed policy is a more powerful force for harm than individual greed or error.”
— Lord Adair Turner, FSA chairman
Although perhaps there’s no policy more ill-designed than one that relies upon the judgement (and thus,
Basel III has landed — full details
It’s here, finally. With a minimum bank capital ratio of 7 per cent.
The world’s central bankers and regulators confirmed new capital and liquidity standards for the banking system on Sunday.
Here are the all-important details on both the reforms’ substance and their implementation dates, via the Basel Committee release.
Save our shorts, redux
Now here’s something you don’t see every day — calm evidence-based, consideration of the impact of short-selling (and thus, rules that prohibit short-selling, conversely) on the price and volatility of stocks.
Basel backtracks
So near, and so far, Basel.
Australia’s Banking Day had the basic numbers overnight on what looks to us like a last-minute climbdown on bank capital:
Australian banks are unlikely to face any problems meeting Basel III capital hurdles after several key capital ratios were eased in Tuesday’s meeting of the Basel Committee…
Basel Schadenfreude
Was this the day bank stocks died?
Sighted in Tuesday’s market – a much bigger Basel III attack than on Monday’s victim, Barclays.
That’s from unconfirmed details of the precise calibrations Basel will bring to bear on banks’ Tier 1 capital and Core Tier 1 capital,
Scenes from an asset-liability mismatch
It’s three years to the day since the UK retail bank Northern Rock suddenly found its access to short-term funding markets frozen — setting the Rock up for collapse one month later, amid a depositor run.
Would the last person to leave the FSA please turn out the lights?
The chart below, from law firm Reynolds Porter Chamberlain, doesn’t reflect flows into safe haven assets.
Nope.
It reflects outflows out of the UK financial services regulator, the FSA:
As the FT reported,
Basel as MMORPG
David at Deus Ex Macchiato has had a pretty capital idea for testing out bank regulation — and a pretty timely one, with Basel reforms in play.
In short, turn it into a game:
There are two classes of players.
Quick comment on the Volcker rule, banks and private equity
The final language of the long-awaited Dodd-Frank financial reform bill runs to a couple thousand pages, and we have short attention spans here on FT Alphaville. In other words, we’re grateful to those providing quick-fire summaries of relevant regulation.
FSA fines JP Morgan record £33.2m
On Thursday, Britain’s Financial Services Authority whacked JP Morgan for failing to segregate client money during the merger with Chase — resulting in what regulators trumpeted as the FSA’s ‘largest ever’ fine at £33.32m.
Tearing flesh off the FSA’s bones
Typical. You launch a regulatory reign of terror so wide-ranging, so baldly inquisitorial, that it would make Robespierre himself blush, and what do you get?
Oblivion.
As the Guardian reports, Britain’s new chancellor George Osborne will probably abolish the FSA after all. Starting with his Mansion House address on 16 June:
Meddling Mandy lives on
The UK Takeover Panel finally published its proposed changes to the Takeover Code on Tuesday — and perhaps suitably for the post-Kraft era, they’re rather stringent.
Lord Mandelson, the former Business Secretary who inspired them,
Market upheaval should not be the new black, SEC says
Volatility might be the new black, but regulators are none too impressed with market upheaval of the May 6 flash crash persuasion.
In a speech on May 24, SEC commissioner Luis Aguilar deplored “the perils of fragmented regulation”