Basel III Rules on Capital Adequacy and Liquidity

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has published the Basel III rules on capital adequacy and liquidity.

These documents present the Basel Committee’s reforms to strengthen global capital and liquidity rules with the goal of promoting a more resilient banking sector. The objective of the reforms is to improve the banking sector’s ability to absorb shocks arising from financial and economic stress, whatever the source, thus reducing the risk of spillover from the financial sector to the real economy.

The Basel Committee is raising the resilience of the banking sector by strengthening the regulatory capital framework, building on the three pillars of the Basel II framework. The reforms raise both the quality and quantity of the regulatory capital base and enhance the risk coverage of the capital framework. They are underpinned by a leverage ratio that serves as a backstop to the risk-based capital measures, is intended to constrain excess leverage in the banking system and provide an extra layer of protection against model risk and measurement error. Finally, the Committee is introducing a number of macroprudential elements into the capital framework to help contain systemic risks arising from procyclicality and from the interconnectedness of financial institutions.

The Committee has further strengthened its liquidity framework by developing two minimum standards for funding liquidity. These standards have been developed to achieve two separate but complementary objectives. The first objective is to promote short-term resilience of a bank’s liquidity risk profile by ensuring that it has sufficient high-quality liquid assets to survive a significant stress scenario lasting for one month. The Committee developed the Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) to achieve this objective. The second objective is to promote resilience over a longer time horizon by creating additional incentives for banks to fund their activities with more stable sources of funding on an ongoing basis. The Net Stable Funding Ratio (NSFR) has a time horizon of one year and has been developed to provide a sustainable maturity structure of assets and liabilities.

Detailed capital adequacy and liquidity rules can be downloaded.