Since mid-2007, an increasing number of people among economists, policy-makers and market operators have blamed the Basel II framework for banks' capital adequacy to be a major cause for the subprime financial crisis. While several issues related to the functioning of financial markets have been...

This paper examines the evolution of the Pillar 2 framework for banks, introduced by the Basel 2 Accord, and discusses the main issues at stake in the current policy debate. The main objective of Pillar 2 was to complement the minimum requirements established by regulators (Pillar 1) with...