From Basel II to Basel III — Changes, Improvements and Proposals

BASEL III is a global regulatory standard on bank capital adequacy, stress testing and market liquidity risk agreed upon by the members of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision in 2010-11. [1] The third installment of the Basel Accords was developed in response to the deficiencies in financial regulation revealed by the late-2000s financial crisis. Basel III strengthens bank capital requirements and introduces new regulatory requirements on bank liquidity and bank leverage. For instance, the change in the calculation of loan risk in Basel II which some consider a causal factor in the credit bubble prior to the 2007-8 collapse: in Basel II one of the principal factors of financial risk management was out-sourced to companies that were not subject to supervision, credit rating agencies. Ratings of creditworthiness and of bonds, financial bundles and various other financial instruments were conducted without supervision by official agencies, leading to AAA ratings on mortgage-backed securities, credit default swaps, and other instruments that proved in practice to be extremely bad credit risks. In Basel III, a more formal scenario analysis is applied (three official scenarios from regulators, with ratings agencies and firms urged to apply more extreme ones).