Abstract:
The article discusses one aspect of financial regulation, procyclicality. With the emergence of the Basel III agreement, many measures are proposed to mitigate this feature such as liquidity requirements, leverage limits, and cyclically variable capital buffers. It is observed that, given the way they were designed, the proposals may not meet their goal of providing greater solidity to the system. It is found that i) the risk-sensitive minimum capital approach may not work well with the leverage ratio; ii) the variable proposed as a reference for the insertion of the countercyclical buffer, the credit/GDP gap, is based on sparse empirical and theoretical evidence, and its adoption can lead to results opposite to those expected. Finally, the paper points out alternatives for regulatory policy, thereby contributing to the debate that has become central to the post-crisis period.
Keywords:
financial regulation; Basel III; procyclicality
