Article: Basel II's Bad All Around, Terrible for U.S. Banks.

Basel II is an inordinately complex set of risk-based capital rules being developed by international bank regulators to apply to the largest U.S. and foreign banks. The more I try to understand the rationale for Basel II the less persuaded I am that there is one.

International regulators developed risk-based capital rules, dubbed Basel I, in the late 1980s to apply to banks of all sizes. They offered two primary justifications for Basel I: that capital rules should apply uniformly to banks throughout the world in order to level the playing field; and that capital requirements should correspond to the level of risk in individual banks.

One could hardly ...

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