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Bank for International Settlements

2011-08-18 11:17:27

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is an intergovernmental

organization of central banks which "fosters international monetary and

financial cooperation and serves as a bank for central banks."[2] It is not

accountable to any national government. The BIS carries out its work through

subcommittees, the secretariats it hosts, and through its annual General

Meeting of all members. It also provides banking services, but only to central

banks, or to international organizations like itself. Based in Basel,

Switzerland, the BIS was established by the Hague agreements of 1930. The name

of the BIS in German: Bank f r Internationalen Zahlungsausgleich (BIZ), in

French: Banque des R glements Internationaux (BRI), in Italian: Banca dei

Regolamenti Internazionali (BRI). It has representative offices in Hong Kong

and Mexico City.

Organization of central banks

As an organization of central banks, the BIS seeks to make monetary policy more

predictable and transparent among its 60 member central banks. While monetary

policy is determined by each sovereign nation, it is subject to central and

private banking scrutiny and potentially to speculation that affects foreign

exchange rates and especially the fate of export economies. Failures to keep

monetary policy in line with reality and make monetary reforms in time,

preferably as a simultaneous policy among all 60 member banks and also

involving the International Monetary Fund, have historically led to losses in

the billions as banks try to maintain a policy using open market methods that

have proven to be unrealistic. Central banks do not unilaterally "set" rates,

rather they set goals and intervene using their massive financial resources and

regulatory powers to achieve monetary targets they set. One reason to

coordinate policy closely is to ensure that this does not become too expensive

and that opportunities for private arbitrage exploiting shifts in policy or

difference in policy, are rare and quickly removed.

Two aspects of monetary policy have proven to be particularly sensitive, and

the BIS therefore has two specific goals: to regulate capital adequacy and make

reserve requirements transparent.

Regulates capital adequacy

Capital adequacy policy applies to equity and capital assets. These can be

overvalued in many circumstances because they do not always reflect current

market conditions or adequately assess the risk of every trading position.

Accordingly the BIS requires the capital/asset ratio of central banks to be

above a prescribed minimum international standard, for the protection of all

central banks involved. The BIS's main role is in setting capital adequacy

requirements. From an international point of view, ensuring capital adequacy is

the most important problem between central banks, as speculative lending based

on inadequate underlying capital and widely varying liability rules causes

economic crises as "bad money drives out good" (Gresham's Law).

Encourages reserve transparency

Reserve policy is also important, especially to consumers and the domestic

economy. To ensure liquidity and limit liability to the larger economy, banks

cannot create money in specific industries or regions without limit. To make

bank depositing and borrowing safer for customers and reduce risk of bank runs,

banks are required to set aside or "reserve".

Reserve policy is harder to standardize as it depends on local conditions and

is often fine-tuned to make industry-specific or region-specific changes,

especially within large developing nations. For instance, the People's Bank of

China requires urban banks to hold 7% reserves while letting rural banks

continue to hold only 6%, and simultaneously telling all banks that reserve

requirements on certain overheated industries would rise sharply or penalties

would be laid if investments in them did not stop completely. The PBoC is thus

unusual in acting as a national bank, focused on the country not on the

currency, but its desire to control asset inflation is increasingly shared

among BIS members who fear "bubbles", and among exporting countries that find

it difficult to manage the diverse requirements of the domestic economy,

especially rural agriculture, and an export economy, especially in manufactured

goods. Effectively, the PBoC sets different reserve levels for domestic and

export styles of development. Historically, the US also did this, by dividing

federal monetary management into nine regions, in which the less-developed

Western US had looser policies.

For various reasons it has become quite difficult to accurately assess reserves

on more than simple loan instruments, and this plus the regional differences

has tended to discourage standardizing any reserve rules at the global BIS

scale. Historically, the BIS did set some standards which favoured lending

money to private landowners (at about 5 to 1) and for-profit corporations (at

about 2 to 1) over loans to individuals. These distinctions reflecting

classical economics were superseded by policies relying on undifferentiated

market values more in line with neoclassical economics.

Tier 1 vs. Total capital

The BIS sets "requirements on two categories of capital, Tier 1 capital and

Total capital. Tier 1 capital is the book value of its stock plus retained

earnings. Tier 2 capital is loan-loss reserves plus subordinated debt. Total

capital is the sum of Tier 1 and Tier 2 capital. Tier 1 capital must be at

least 4% of total risk-weighted assets. Total capital must be at least 8% of

total risk-weighted assets. When a bank creates a deposit to fund a loan, its

assets and liabilities increase equally, with no increase in equity. That

causes its capital ratio to drop. Thus the capital requirement limits the total

amount of credit that a bank may issue. It is important to note that the

capital requirement applies to assets while the bank reserve requirement

applies to liabilities."[3]

Goal: a financial safety net

The relatively narrow role the BIS plays today does not reflect its ambitions

or historical role.

A "well-designed financial safety net, supported by strong prudential

regulation and supervision, effective laws that are enforced, and sound

accounting and disclosure regimes," are among the Bank's goals. In fact they

have been in its mandate since its founding in 1930 as a means to enforce the

Treaty of Versailles.

The BIS has historically had less power to enforce this "safety net" than it

deems necessary. Recent head Andrew Crockett has bemoaned its inability to

"hardwire the credit culture," despite many specific attempts to address

specific concerns such as the growth of Offshore Financial Centres (OFCs),

Highly Leveraged Institutions (HLIs), Large and Complex Financial Institutions

(LCFIs), deposit insurance and especially the spread of money laundering and

accounting scandals.

History

The BIS was formed in 1930. The main actors in its establishment were the

then-Governor of The Bank of England, Montagu Norman, and his German

counterpart Hjalmar Schacht, later Adolf Hitler's finance minister. The Bank

was originally intended to facilitate reparation payments imposed on Germany by

the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War.[4] The need for the bank

was suggested in 1929 by the Young Committee, and was agreed to in August of

that year at a conference at the Hague. A charter for the bank was drafted at

the International Bankers Conference at Baden Baden in November. The charter

was adopted at a second Hague Conference on January 20, 1930.

During the period 1933 45, the board of directors of the BIS included Walter

Funk, a prominent Nazi official, and Emil Puhl, who were both convicted at the

Nuremberg trials after World War II, as well as Herman Schmitz the director of

IG Farben and Baron von Schroeder, the owner of the J.H.Stein Bank, the bank

that held the deposits of the Gestapo. There were allegations that the BIS had

helped the Germans loot assets from occupied countries during World War II.

As a result of these allegations, at the Bretton Woods Conference in July 1944,

Norway proposed the "liquidation of the Bank for International Settlements at

the earliest possible moment". This resulted in the BIS being the subject of a

disagreement between the American and British delegations. The liquidation of

the bank was supported by other European delegates, as well as the United

States (including Harry Dexter White, Secretary of the Treasury and Henry

Morgenthau),[5] but opposed by John Maynard Keynes, head of the British

delegation. The disagreement led to Chase Bank representative Dean Atchison

interrupting Keynes at one of the conference sessions. Fearing that the BIS

would be dissolved by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Keynes went to

Morgenthau hoping to prevent the dissolution, or have it postponed, but the

next day the dissolution of the BIS was approved. However, the liquidation of

the bank was never undertaken.[6] The British delegation did not give up and

the dissolution of the bank was still not accomplished when Roosevelt died. In

April 1945, the new president Harry S. Truman and the British suspended the

dissolution and the decision to liquidate the BIS was officially reversed in

1948.[7]

The BIS was originally owned by both governments and private individuals, since

the United States and France had decided to sell some of their shares to

private investors. BIS shares traded on stock markets, which made the bank a

unique organization: an international organization (in the technical sense of

public international law), yet with private shareholders. Many central banks

had similarly started as such private institutions; for example, the Bank of

England was privately owned until 1946. In more recent years[when?] the BIS has

forcibly bought back all shares held by private investors, and is now wholly

owned by its member central banks.

Since 2004, the BIS has published its accounts in terms of Special Drawing

Rights, or SDRs, replacing the Gold Franc as the bank's unit of account. As of

March 2007 (end of month) the bank had total assets of $409.15 billion, given a

dollar/SDR exchange rate of 1.51 for March 30, 2007. Included in that total is

150 tons of fine gold.

Role in banking supervision

The BIS provides the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision with its

twelve-member secretariat, and with it has played a central role in

establishing the Basel Capital Accords of 1988 and 2004. There remain

significant differences between US, EU and UN officials regarding the degree of

capital adequacy and reserve controls that global banking now requires. Put

extremely simply, the US as of 2006 favoured strong strict central controls in

the spirit of the original 1988 accords, the EU was more inclined to a

distributed system managed collectively with a committee able to approve some

exceptions. The UN agencies especially ICLEI are firmly committed to

fundamental risk measures: the so-called triple bottom line and were becoming

critical of central banking as an institutional structure for ignoring

fundamental risks in favour of technical risk management.