At the peak of the Global Financial Crisis in fall 2008, each of the 27 member states in the European Union (EU) set many of its own banking rules and had its own bank regulators and supervisors. The crisis made the shortcomings of this decentralized approach obvious, and since its formation in...

Lehman’s U.S. broker-dealer, Lehman Brothers Inc. (LBI), was excluded from the parent company’s bankruptcy filing on September 15, 2008, because it was thought that the solvent subsidiary might be able to wind down its affairs in a normal fashion. However, the force of the parent’s demise...

Ireland went from being the poorest member of the European Economic Community in 1973 to enjoying the second highest per-capita income among European countries by 2007.  Healthy growth in the 1990s eventually gave way to a concentrated boom in property-related lending in the 2000s.  The growth...

All public companies in the European Union, including Ireland’s major banks, were required to adopt IAS 39 for their annual accounting periods beginning on or after January 1, 2005.  Under the “incurred loss” model of IAS 39, banks could set aside reserves for loan losses only when...

Investment banks are in the business of taking calculated risks. Risk management infrastructure facilitates the safe pursuit of profits and the balancing of associated risks. By 2006, Lehman Brothers was thought to have a very respectable risk management system, and even its regulator, the...

The Net Stable Funding Ratio (NSFR), a liquidity standard introduced by Basel III, seeks to promote a better match between the liquidity of a bank’s assets and the manner in which the bank funds those assets.  The NSFR requires banks to maintain a minimum amount of funding deemed “stable”...

In December 2011, the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer of JPMorgan Chase (JPM) instructed the bank’s Chief Investment Office to reduce the size of its Synthetic Credit Portfolio (SCP) during 2012, so that JPM could decrease its Risk-Weighted Assets as the bank prepared to...

From the earliest efforts to mandate the amount of capital banks must maintain, regulators have grappled with how best to accomplish this task. Until the 1980s, regulation had been based largely on discretion and judgment. In the wake of two bank failures, the central bank governors of the G10...

When it filed for bankruptcy protection in September 2008, Lehman Brothers was an active participant in the derivatives market and was party to 906,000 derivative transactions of all types under 6,120 ISDA Master Agreements with an estimated notional value of $35 trillion. The majority of...