Yesterday central bankers, including the ECB, clarified rules on bank capital as part of the process of avoiding too big to fail; the agreement has yet to be ratified by legislators. European banks are the ones who must raise the most capital against their trading books and provision more deeply against mortgages. In assessing the risk of their portfolios banks should converge more closely with regulators’ risk calculations.
The UK National Audit Office says that if they were banks, universities would be accused of miss-selling their academic courses. Findings published in a report today claim that only a third of undergraduates believed their courses offered value for money. It also suggested that student loans, likely to be the second biggest debt (after a mortgage) an individual was likely to take on, were doled out with almost no advice to the borrower.
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