New Zealand shows the way again?

Three decades ago, New Zealand was the first country in the world to adopt a formal inflation target for its central bank. At around the same time, it also broke new ground in bank regulation with a focus on self-discipline and market-discipline with the regulator focusing mainly on systemic risks (a good summary is available here). Today, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand may be showing the way again with its proposal last week to almost double bank capital requirements.

More than the actual proposal itself, it is the approach that is interesting and likely to be influential. The fact that New Zealand is not a Basle Committee member gives it greater freedom to start from first principles. That is what they have done starting with their mandate to promote a sound and efficient financial system. First, they express the soundness goal in risk appetite terms: “a banking crisis in New Zealand shouldn’t happen more than once every two hundred years”. Second, they interpret the efficiency goal in terms of the literature on optimal capital requirements. This means that they begin by computing the capital requirements that would reduce the probability of a crisis to less than 0.5% per year, and then go on to ask if the optimal capital may be even higher. So the capital requirement is the higher of that determined from soundness and efficiency goals.

Another welcome thing about the proposal is that higher capital is seen as a way for the Reserve Bank of New Zealand to maintain its emphasis on self-discipline and market-discipline:

Capital requirements are the most important component of our overall regulatory arrangements. In the absence of stronger capital requirements, other rules and monitoring of bank’s activities would need to be much tougher.

They end up with Tier-1 capital of 16% as opposed to the existing 8.5% (6% + 2.5% conservation buffer). The 16% includes a countercyclical capital buffer, but unlike in other countries, this buffer would have a positive value at all times, except following a financial crisis. The 16% also includes a 1% D-SIB buffer for the large banks, but excludes the 2% Tier-2 capital requirement (which they are maintaining for the time being, though they would to have only Tier-1 capital).

What is interesting is that 16% is not the regulatory minimum (that remains at the current 6% level). Their idea seems to be that above 16%, it is all self-discipline and market-discipline, but as capital falls below that level, the regulator starts getting involved according to a “framework of escalating supervisory responses based on objective triggers that can provide clarity and much more certainty”. On the other side, when banks are operating above 16%, the Reserve Bank will impose relatively
less of a regulatory burden on banks. They are even ready to consider allowing banks to change their internal risk models without regulatory approval at all. Below 16%, the supervisory responses escalate as follows:

• Subject to increased monitoring
• Capital plan must be submittted
• Approval may be required for new business lines
• A bank’s activities may be restricted
• Additional capital must be raised

One of the dangers of international harmonization of financial sector regulation under the auspices of Basel, FSB and G20 has been the risk of a regulatory mono-culture. New Zealand located at the edge of the world and outside the Basel system is providing a good antidote to this.