Free content

The Bank of England’s broad conception of transparency, revealed in a consultation on ABS eligibility criteria, is refreshing in a world where everyone is looking for a silver bullet.

While a tax on banks to create a bailout fund is sensible in principle, in practice it could, in fact, lead to greater market indiscipline. Moreover, the latest banker bashing — from an unlikely source, the UK Conservative party — shows that momentum for global harmonisation of financial rules is close to fizzling out.

Veteran banker Lionel Kwok is set to join Standard Chartered Private Bank as managing director and head of investment advisory for north-east Asia, asiamoney.com understands.

Rabobank has taken contingent capital in a bold new direction, eschewing conversion into equity-like instruments for an automatic writedown. But without any regulatory benefit, it is not entirely clear what's in it for the Dutch bank.

A judgement from a French court of appeals upholding creditors’ rights could be just what is needed to bring securitisation issuers from the country out of the wilderness.

Korean issuers, the mainstay of the Asian debt capital markets in recent years, are set to return to the international bond markets in force, with financial institutions and corporate borrowers planning dollar deals, EuroWeek can reveal.

UK lenders face a huge challenge in funding their mortgage books over the next few years. Securitisations will provide key indicators as to how difficult that hurdle will be to overcome. So far the signs have been mixed, but Santander’s announcement of what many would call the first true UK RMBS since the crisis began will provide the clearest answer yet.

UK mortgage lenders and rating agencies have woken up to the threat of £319bn of state-supported borrowing that will need refinancing in the three years from 2011. But pleas for further state aid will likely go unheeded: the securitisation industry has already had two years to put its house in order while the government has its own fiscal problems to worry about.

If only size matters, then China’s banks could be about to take over the Asian debt markets. But there’s more to it than that and the prospect remains little more than an interesting possibility.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s star bankers say the firm could be about to renege on pay deals put in place last year to retain staff. The bank appears to have settled on a solution already used by Citi and Royal Bank of Scotland to pay some of its bonuses, writes David Rothnie.

Giovanni Carosio, the chairman of the Committee of European Banking Supervisors (CEBS), said this week that solutions to bank regulation should be global.

Weakening asset quality is likely to be a bigger concern for UK and Spanish banks than other European financial institutions in 2010, said rating agency Fitch in a report on the sector published this week.