Basel: Das internationale Basel: die BIZ und die globalen Standardsetzer

Das internationale Basel: die BIZ und die globalen Standardsetzer – ein Teil des Buches «Basel als internationaler Finanzplatz» von Dr. Alexander Ressos.

International Basel: the BIS and the Global Standard Setters

Part F leaves the domestic financial centre and turns to the institutions that have made the name of Basel familiar to bankers, supervisors and finance ministers around the world. Few people outside Switzerland could locate the city on a map, yet the expressions "Basel I", "Basel II" and "Basel III" belong to the everyday vocabulary of every bank treasurer, risk manager and banking lawyer. The reason is the Bank for International Settlements, which has had its seat in Basel since 1930 and has hosted, since the 1970s, a growing family of committees and associations that set international standards for banking supervision, payment systems, insurance supervision and financial stability. A city of fewer than two hundred thousand inhabitants thus lends its name to the rules that govern capital, liquidity and risk management in the largest banks of the world.

What makes Basel a capital of international finance is therefore a concentration of governance, since the city hosts no large international market and no global banking group of its own. The central banks of the world meet there every two months, the supervisors draft their standards in its meeting rooms. Research produced at the Centralbahnplatz shapes the debate on monetary policy and financial stability. The legal framework that makes this possible deserves the attention of the lawyer, because the BIS combines the form of a company limited by shares with the status of an international organisation. Its relationship with Switzerland rests on a treaty of 1930 and a Headquarters Agreement of 1987.

The five chapters of Part F examine this international Basel. Chapter I describes the Bank for International Settlements itself: its legal foundations, its status under international and Swiss law, its shareholders, its governance and its functions as a bank for central banks and as a forum for their cooperation. Chapter II turns to the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and the three generations of the Basel Accords. Chapter III examines how Switzerland has implemented Basel III and how the collapse of Credit Suisse has reopened the debate on the capital of systemically important banks. Chapter IV describes the Financial Stability Board, the International Association of Insurance Supervisors, the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures and the BIS Innovation Hub. Chapter V considers Basel as a brand of global governance, from the Basel Institute on Governance to the Basel Convention on hazardous wastes.

About the book

This part belongs to Basel as an International Financial Centre by Dr Alexander Ressos, published here in full, section by section.