And what does it mean for one bank in particular? Last week, audit firm KPMG published its quarterly Financial Institutions Performance Survey (or FIPS). It featured the deteriorating profitability of New Zealand’s banks. Bad news of course, and the New Zealand financial press quickly jumped on the survey. Radio New Zealand printed a headline sporting… Read More Eyes Wide Shut: Did Bank Capital Grow under RBNZ’s Governor Orr?
Once in a while I meet bankers and bank regulators, sometimes over a cup of coffee, sometimes over a glass of Pinot Noir. In fact, I will attend an event with RBNZ’s Adrian Orr tomorrow. He will speak at the brand new PwC centre in Wellington. When it comes to bank capital, the narrative shared… Read More When will the RBNZ admit its capital ratio definitions are bent? (And copy APRA’s plan to straighten them?)
About a fortnight ago Kiwibank announced that its formerly disqualified capital instruments now re-qualify as capital. Yay! This after a the capital disqualification event on which I wrote not so long ago. There was almost no press coverage of the re-qualification. Yes, there was NBR’s Jenny Ruth who wrote a noisy and non-informative story on the… Read More Kiwibank capital flip-flop
Kiwibank’s capital cock-up took an unexpected turn this week when the bank made another extraordinary announcement. On Friday, the bank let us know that its parents will bail out the bank with an infusion of $247 million of common equity. Sheesh, I thought only Italy did bail-outs! Infusing equity capital is the last thing a… Read More Kiwibank puts its money where its mouth should be
My post on EU leverage ratios yesterday attracted some comments on twitter, which may haven been triggered by misunderstandings. The CRR offers a short and clear summary of the Leverage Ratio definition in Article 429.1: “The leverage ratio shall be calculated as an institution’s capital measure divided by that institution’s total exposure measure and shall… Read More FYI some documentation on the Leverage Ratio for EU banks
Uh oh, Jeroen Dijsselbloem form the Netherlands got into rough water this week: Dutch newspaper NRC had a nice scoop that showed how he relied on ING word smiths for writing a tax rule that renders bank capital instruments (CoCos) tax deductible, see full freedom of information documentation here. How bad is this? End 2013,… Read More Five years after the first Basel III coco issuance, the Netherlands “gets” CoCos.
Frances Coppola this week posted on her blog an explanation of Capital, liquidity and the countercyclical buffer, in plain English. Frances posted because of Caroline Binham’s use of language in a Financial Times article. Caroline, according to Frances, is wrong. So wrong even that she takes it out on Caroline, blaming her for not being… Read More The language of Capital and Equity
Over the last weeks, the issue of bank Deferred Tax Assets (DTAs) came up again. What does not really help ending this story is the confusion on the subject of DTAs. Let me make a stab in trying to end the DTA confusion. Here are some snippets that from various news sources that I gathered.… Read More In defence of bank DTAs
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