Following a year in which repeated political turmoil sapped investor confidence in Mexico, putting pressure on the peso and draining the country's foreign exchange reserves, on December 22, 1994 the Mexican government sparked a financial crisis by unexpectedly abandoning its policy of anchoring...

In the Spring of 1992 the Swedish government faced a dilemma. The country was in the midst of an economic downturn stemming from the collapse of asset prices (especially in real estate) that had spiked as a result of a credit boom that followed the deregulation of the Swedish banking system in...

In November 1997 the Japanese government confronted a problem of enormous proportions when the turmoil that had been roiling the financial markets since the collapse of a real estate and stock market asset bubble in 1990 reached a crescendo with the failure of four major financial institutions...

When Lehman Brothers Holdings, Inc. (LBHI) sought Chapter 11 protection, the more than 6,000 counterparties with which its subsidiaries had entered into over 900,000 over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives transactions faced the question of how best to respond to protect their interests. The...

In the wake of the financial crisis of 2007-2009, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) faced the critical task of diagnosing what went wrong and then updating regulatory standards aimed at preventing it from occurring again. In seeking to strengthen the microprudential regulation...

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” by...

Hedge funds rely on “prime brokerage” units within banks to provide leverage. With the enhanced capital requirements and new liquidity standards introduced by Basel III driving up the cost to banks of engaging in such financing, prime brokers have begun to offer an alternative means of...

After the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) introduced the Basel III framework in 2010, individual countries confronted the question of how best to implement the framework given their unique circumstances. Switzerland, with a banking industry that is both heavily concentrated and...

For financial regulators seeking to use regulatory requirements to manage risk in a banking system, there can be a concern that such requirements crowd out efforts by banks to develop their own risk management systems. One way in which regulators have attempted to solve this problem is to enable...

One of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision's responses to the global financial crisis of 2007-2009 was to introduce the Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR), a short-term measure that evaluates whether a bank has enough liquidity to meet expected cash outflows during a 30-day stress scenario....