Steve Forbes’ latest commentary calls for an end to the Basel Capital Accords. His piece quotes my recent article in American Banker:
U.S. banks overall are more than adequately capitalized. Regulations are stifling bank lending and unnecessarily increasing costs. JPMorgan Chase’s boss, Jamie Dimon, estimates that regulations add as much as 80 basis points to mortgages. That’s almost $300 a month for a typical new mortgage.
Thanks to suffocating regulations, a major decline took place in lending by banks to startups, hindering economic vitality and creativity.
Former FDIC head Bill Isaac accurately sums it up: ‘The Basel regimes are riddled with complex and dubious models and are expensive, cumbersome and nearly impossible to understand and enforce.’
Read his commentary here.