Study on Call Reports Supports Status Quo

Regulators may not need hundreds of new call report entries to estimate banks' interest rate risk, two Federal Reserve Board banking supervisors said in a study published this week.

Information already available on bank call reports can be used to come up with interest rate risk measures similar to those that the Office of Thrift Supervision derives from its complex, 500-item interest rate questionnaire, David M. Wright and James V. Houpt wrote in an article in February's Federal Reserve Bulletin.

Bankers, who oppose a proposal to enlarge call reports with several pages of interest rate risk questions, welcomed the study's conclusions. "It raises the question, why do you need additional reporting?" said Jim Chessen, chief economist at the American Bankers Association.

The two officials of the Fed's banking supervision division -Mr. Wright is a project manager and Mr. Houpt an assistant director -did conclude that interest rate risk measures could be improved somewhat by asking banks 39 new questions about loan repricing, derivatives, and servicing rights.

At the same time, however, they cautioned that no one has figured out how to accurately measure the sensitivity of core deposits to interest rate shifts - a failure which, they said, "underscores the lack of precision in any measure of bank interest rate risk."

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