The European Commission has finalised its proposal on the fourth iteration of the Capital Requirements Directive. It makes the EU the first jurisdiction to pass into law the Basel III rules agreed last year. Many are worried about the impact it may have while European economies remain fragile.
Passing financial regulation is complicated and fraught with political and other tensions; but it may surprise the uninitiated in its openness and transparency. Can the European institutions responsible cope with the huge raft of regulation which they are committed to implementing?
UniCredit's new management team faces a sizeable task particularly as the eurozone crisis threatens to suck in Italy and the bank's shareprice is sliding. However, the new CEO of the corporate and investment bank, Jean Pierre Mustier, is confident that UniCredit can do it.
On the one-year anniversary of Dodd-Frank, much may have been achieved, but almost as many rule-making deadlines have been missed. More importantly, there are growing industry concerns that lack of agreement about how to apply the extraterritorial reach of US regulation is a problem that just will not go away.
The US is in trouble. Its infrastructure is in dire need of repair but the heavily indebted country cannot afford to pay for it. All the more surprising then that the overtures of private – and in many cases foreign – capital are being met with resistance.
The US's Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act puts onerous burdens on foreign institutions to capture data about US clients and any clients with ownership of US assets, and to report related tax information to the country's tax authorities. For banks, it is a huge task but they had better do it well, as this is likely to be the first of many such schemes.
Since the Greek sovereign debt crisis unfolded, many European politicians have accused speculators of using credit default swaps to bet on sovereign default and thereby intensify a debt event. Research – some by the European Commission itself – has shown that this causal relationship does not exist. Yet there is significant support for action.
The relative resiliance of Africa's financial markets to social and political unrest in the north, and to the default of Côte d'Ivoire on last year's global bond, suggest that the continent's markets have taken one more step towards greater sophistication. Investors are increasingly differentiating one from another.
The boom in high-yield markets has continued into 2011 and money continues to flow into emerging market debt - leading some to talk about bubbles and a return to bad habits. Elsewhere in the debt markets, the financial crisis and its aftermath are still being felt.