Tuesday, July 07, 2015

Basel risk-weights: Sovereign (Monarch) 0%, AAArisktocracy 20% and citizens 100%: And the world said nothing!

With the Basel Accord of 1988 (signed one year before the Berlin wall fall) regulators, for the purpose of setting the capital requirements for banks, assigned a 0% risk weight for loans to the sovereign and 100% to the private sector. Some years later, 2004, with Basel II, they reduced the risk-weight for loans to those in the private sector rated AAA to AA to 20%, and left the unrated citizens with their 100%.

That has introduced a considerable regulatory subsidy for the bank borrowings of the infallible sovereign (government bureaucrats) and of those of the private sector deemed almost infallible. And that has severely taxed the access to bank credit, of those deemed as risky, like SMEs and entrepreneurs.

That de facto means that bank regulators believe that government bureaucrats know better what to do with bank credit than citizens.

And the world said nothing! What's wrong? Have all gone statist?