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July 19, 2011 at 08:00 PM
The Financial Stability Board (FSB) is still trying to decide just where insurers should fit in rules meant to address systemic and moral hazard risks at systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs).
The G20, a group for developed economies, set up the FSB, Basel, Switzerland, to help develop strategies for increasing the stability of the world financial system.
The FSB and a related group, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, today began seeking comments on two documents that describe measures for controlling SIFI risk.
The groups developed the measures to implement a framework that the G20 leaders endorsed in November 2010.
The banking group’s document deals with regulation of banks.
The FSB document, on Effective Resolution of Systemically Important Financial Institutions, refers directly to insurers and other types of non-bank SIFIs.
Drafters call for:
- Strengthened national resolution regimes that give a designated resolution authority a broad range of powers and tools to resolve a financial institution that is no longer viable.
- Cross-border cooperation arrangements in the form of institution-specific cooperation agreements, backed by national law.
- Improved resolution planning by firms and authorities based on regular resolvability assessments.
- Measures to remove obstacles to resolution arising from “complex firm structures and business practices, fragmented information systems, intra-group transactions, reliance on service providers and the provision of global payment services.”
The FSB also has released discussion notes on the “creditor hierarchy” — who should be first in line to get paid if a SIFI fails.
In a discussion of scope, FSB document drafters note that many document objectives could apply to SIFIs of all sizes that could be systemically significant or critical in particular circumstances.
