Basel III vs Accounting Standards in the Liquidity Reporting

Recent crisis has shown the failure of capital markets in satisfying the liquidity needs of agents. As a consequence, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision is now paying attention to the matter of Liquidity Risk introducing provisions banks must comply with, in order to promote short-term and long-term resilience. At the same time, the IASB amended IAS 39 by introducing IFRS 9, which regulates the accounting treatment of financial instruments. Nevertheless the intent of the BCBS to discipline the Liquidity Risk and the effort of the IASB to introduce provisions designated to give relevant and useful information on the entity's future cash flows, there are some critical points associated with those requirements and coming from the combined observations of both disciplines. The problems that will highlight derive from the different objectives of the regulatory and the accounting frameworks. The first one is to serve the safety and soundness of banks and the other is to serve the public interest in terms of transparency. For this reason the IASB should think about the chance to issue a standard specific for the banking sector. Indeed, the management of financial instruments while represents the core business in the latter, has just a secondary role in non-financial entities, so it is desirable to have a differential treatment. Moreover, as the dual reporting deriving forms the differences in both disciplines may generate political costs, it could be useful to recompose the different perspectives providing a supplementary disclosure to justify the two special purposes