See also
- List of bank stress tests
- European System of Financial Supervisors
- Supervisory Capital Assessment Program, a similar exercise in the United States of America
A European Union-wide banking stress test has been conducted by the Committee of European Banking Supervisors every year since 2009. The second instance (2010 European Union banking stress test exercise) was performed in July 2010. This third round was carried out with results published in July 2011. The Council of the European Union (in its economic and financial – ECOFIN – configuration) mandated that Committee so to do, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis which started in 2007.
The results for the 2011 exercises were published on 15 July. [1] Eight out of 90 banks failed the test—five in Spain, two in Greece and one in Austria. [2] Spain also is one of the leading countries in the list of approved banks (20), because it put up almost all of its financial sector (95 per cent, against an average of about 60 per cent). [3]
The test is controversial, because Spain and Germany have complained the stress tests excluded dynamic provisions recognised by local regulators. [4] In fact, a German bank didn't pass the test but they refused to publish its data and therefore it is not included in the official list
The Basel Accords refer to the banking supervision accords issued by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS).
Banking regulation and supervision refers to a form of financial regulation which subjects banks to certain requirements, restrictions and guidelines, enforced by a financial regulatory authority generally referred to as banking supervisor, with semantic variations across jurisdictions. By and large, banking regulation and supervision aims at ensuring that banks are safe and sound and at fostering market transparency between banks and the individuals and corporations with whom they conduct business.
A capital requirement is the amount of capital a bank or other financial institution has to have as required by its financial regulator. This is usually expressed as a capital adequacy ratio of equity as a percentage of risk-weighted assets. These requirements are put into place to ensure that these institutions do not take on excess leverage and risk becoming insolvent. Capital requirements govern the ratio of equity to debt, recorded on the liabilities and equity side of a firm's balance sheet. They should not be confused with reserve requirements, which govern the assets side of a bank's balance sheet—in particular, the proportion of its assets it must hold in cash or highly-liquid assets. Capital is a source of funds not a use of funds.
Banca March, S.A., is a Spanish investment bank and financial services company headquartered in Palma and Madrid.
The Supervisory Capital Assessment Program, publicly described as the bank stress tests, was an assessment of capital conducted by the Federal Reserve System and thrift supervisors to determine if the largest U.S. financial organizations had sufficient capital buffers to withstand the recession and the financial market turmoil. The test used two macroeconomic scenarios, one based on baseline conditions and the other with more pessimistic expectations, to plot a 'What If?' exploration into the banking situation in the rest of 2009 and into 2010. The capital levels at 19 institutions were assessed based on their Tier 1 common capital, although it was originally thought that regulators would use tangible common equity as the yardstick. The results of the tests were released on May 7, 2009, at 5pm EST.
In finance, a stress test is an analysis or simulation designed to determine the ability of a given financial instrument or financial institution to deal with an economic crisis. Instead of doing financial projection on a "best estimate" basis, a company or its regulators may do stress testing where they look at how robust a financial instrument is in certain crashes, a form of scenario analysis. They may test the instrument under, for example, the following stresses:
The Committee of European Banking Supervisors (CEBS) was an independent advisory group on banking supervision in the European Union (EU), active from its establishment in 2004 to its replacement on 1 January 2011 by the European Banking Authority (EBA) which took over all its tasks and responsibilities following Regulation (EC) No. 1093/2010 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 November 2010.
Basel III is the third Basel Accord, a framework that sets international standards for bank capital adequacy, stress testing, and liquidity requirements. Augmenting and superseding parts of the Basel II standards, it was developed in response to the deficiencies in financial regulation revealed by the financial crisis of 2007–08. It is intended to strengthen bank capital requirements by increasing minimum capital requirements, holdings of high quality liquid assets, and decreasing bank leverage.
The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) is an agency of the European Union located in Paris.
The European Banking Authority (EBA) is a regulatory agency of the European Union headquartered in La Défense, Île-de-France. Its activities include conducting stress tests on European banks to increase transparency in the European financial system and identifying weaknesses in banks' capital structures.
A systemically important financial institution (SIFI) is a bank, insurance company, or other financial institution whose failure might trigger a financial crisis. They are colloquially referred to as "too big to fail".
A European Union-wide banking stress test exercise has been conducted by the Committee of European Banking Supervisors every year since 2009. The second instance was performed in July 2010. The Council of the European Union mandated that Committee so to do, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis which started in 2007.
European Banking Supervision, also known as the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM), is the policy framework for the prudential supervision of banks in the euro area. It is centered on the European Central Bank (ECB), whose supervisory arm is referred to as ECB Banking Supervision. EU member states outside of the euro area can also participate on a voluntary basis, as was the case of Bulgaria as of late 2023. European Banking Supervision was established by Regulation 1024/2013 of the Council, also known as the SSM Regulation, which also created its central decision-making body, the ECB Supervisory Board.
The Vienna initiative was a plan undertaken in January 2009 by European banks and governments during the height of the financial crisis to control the situation and work towards a joint solution specifically in developing regions of Europe. It has been created to avoid a bank crash that was threatening the region because of the subprime crisis as the liquidity in the CESEE countries depended on the Western ones. It is a forum where the representatives of the private and public economical sector from the Western countries but also Central, Eastern and South-Eastern European countries (CESEE) meet. This Initiative impacted much of those countries, notably Romania.
The banking union refers to the transfer of responsibility for banking policy from the member state-level to the union-wide level in several EU member states, initiated in 2012 as a response to the 2009 Eurozone crisis. The motivation for the banking union was the fragility of numerous banks in the Eurozone, and the identification of a vicious circle between credit conditions for these banks and the sovereign credit of their respective home countries. In several countries, private debts arising from a property bubble were transferred to the respective sovereign as a result of banking system bailouts and government responses to slowing economies post-bubble. Conversely, weakness in sovereign credit resulted in deterioration of the balance sheet position of the banking sector, not least because of high domestic sovereign exposures of the banks.
The European Union-wide banking stress test 2014 was conducted by the European Banking Authority in order to assess the resilience of financial institutions in the European Union to a hypothetical adverse market scenario. In total, 123 major EU banks participated in the exercise. 24 banks failed the test with an overall capital shortfall of EUR 24.2 billion under the adverse scenario.
The European Union-wide banking stress test 2016 was conducted by the European Banking Authority (EBA) in order to assess the resilience of financial institutions in the European Union to a hypothetical adverse market scenario. The stress test was formally launched on 24 February 2016 with a publication of the final methodology and templates as well as the scenarios. It covered over 70% of the national banking-industry assets in the euro area, each EU member state and Norway. 53 EU banks participated in the exercise, 39 of which are directly supervised by the ECB under European Banking Supervision. The outcomes of the exercise, including banks' individual results, were published on 29 July 2016, at 22:00 CET.