Banks Face New Rules on Capital Disclosures

WASHINGTON — The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision issued final rules Tuesday on how banks must disclose the capital they hold in a move designed to boost the quality of the disclosures detailing how institutions are complying with Basel III.

"The disclosure requirements adopted by the Committee will let banks demonstrate the improvements to the quality of their capital bases as they proceed towards Basel III implementation," said Stefan Ingves, chairman of the Basel Committee and Governor of Sveriges Riksbank, Sweden's central bank.

By doing so, market participants and supervisors will be able to make detailed assessments of a banks' capital position and compare it among its peers, the committee said. During the crisis, banks' disclosures were "insufficiently detailed" and also lacked a "consistency in reporting across banks and jurisdictions," the committee said in a statement.

"This lack of clarity may have contributed to uncertainty during the financial crisis and could have masked how far banks were relying on forms of capital that were insufficiently loss-absorbent," the committee said. "The disclosure requirements published today should help to improve market discipline by enhancing both transparency and comparability."

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