s
MINISTER FOR INDUSTRY,
BUSINESS AND FINANCIAL
AFFAIRS
Dear Executive Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis
First accept my sincere congratulations on your appointment as Executive
Vice-President for An Economy that Works for the People.
Thank you for the opportunity to respond to the consultation on the imple-
mentation of the Basel III standards.
Generally, we find that there are many reasonable and, in our view, positive
adjustments in the recommendations from the Basel Committee on Bank-
ing Supervision (BCBS) (e.g. the changes to operational risk and IRB mod-
els for credit risk). However, we continue to have strong reservations in
relation to the output floor, which has a number of adverse implications.
Most importantly, and although it is not the stated intention, the output
floor could result in a decrease in the risk sensitivity in the capital require-
ments of financial institutions by effectively disregarding those internal
models currently applied by the largest credit institutions in e.g. Denmark.
The result is that credit institutions will have incentive to increase risk tak-
ing as they can take on more risky exposures without corresponding in-
creases in capital requirements. In our view, this contradicts the fundamen-
tal purpose of the reforms.
Additionally, impact studies show that the Basel III package will lead to a
substantial and unjustified increase in capital requirements, by e.g. increas-
ing the capital requirements of the largest Danish credit institutions by ap-
prox. 40 percent. The output floor is the main contributor to this very sig-
nificant increase.
An implementation of the output floor should preserve a risk sensitive ap-
proach in terms of capital requirements. The output floor should generally
only work as a backstop to risk based capital requirements. This would not
be achieved for Danish credit institutions with the calibration of the output
floor proposed by the Basel Committee.
Denmark has been and continues to be a strong supporter of measures to
strengthen financial stability. We firmly believe that financial stability is
MINISTRY OF INDUSTRY,
BUSINESS AND FINANCIAL
AFFAIRS
Slotsholmsgade 10-12
1216 Copenhagen K
Denmark
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+45 33 92 33 50
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