In his final address on July 12, 2016 as the EU’s Commissioner for Financial Stability, Jonathan Hill announced that the European Commission would push the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) to rethink some of its Basel III reforms in light of their affects on capital, trade finance, market liquidity, and access to clearing.  While applauding the regulatory work done to ensure financial stability, Hill worries that global regulators have become too risk averse, missing the big picture and trading growth for stabil

In a June 8, 2016 address in Berlin, Dr. Andreas Dombret, Member of the Executive Board of the Deutsche Bundesbank, spoke about potentially easing the burden on smaller financial institutions by calibrating financial regulation based on banking entities' size and complexity. Dr. Dombret began his remarks by warning that the burdens of regulatory reform may be overwhelming smaller institutions. And with only larger banks able to cope, increased regulation may have the unintended effect of driving more consolidation, resulting in less diversity, more concentration of risk, and perpetuation of the too big to fail phenomenon.

In March 2016, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) published a paper reviewing the current knowledge and empirical data on the effects of new bank capital and liquidity requirements.  This literature review is comprised of three essays surveying the current body of research and empirical studies on liquidity and its interaction with capital and on other supervisory requirements.

Because the study is a literature review, BIS did not perform empirical analysis of its own. Rather, the authors carefully examined the available studies performed, assessed their scope, methodologies, and results, and drew conclusions regarding what has been learned thus far, noting gaps or areas still in development.  Overall, the literature review’s authors found that, because new capital requirements have been in place for quite awhile, a great deal of research has already been performed on their costs and benefits, as well as their effects on economic activity. In contrast, liquidity requirements and other supervisory tools like buffers and stress tests have only been implemented since the recent financial crisis. As a result, there has been far less time to study their efficacy or their knock-on effects, leaving gaps in the literature.