Basel III: if ever there were three syllables that could bring a grown banker to tears, these are they. In the 15-plus years since the financial crisis, the western world has been through a protracted process of rewriting regulations to protect against another 2008. The last pieces of that puzzle — conceived by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and known as Basel 3.1 — are now close to being slotted into place across the western world. 

Until recently, US banks thought they were set to come off worst. Federal Reserve vice-chair for supervision Michael Barr had gold-plated the Basel rules, provoking a fierce backlash from Wall Street’s finest. But that lobbying, and the placatory intervention of Fed chair Jay Powell, appears likely to leave US banks with a watered-down impact that will be very similar to their European rivals — an uplift of perhaps 10 per cent in their capital requirements compared with the 20 per cent or so previously predicted, according to bankers.

The oddest feature of the US reforms is that most small and mid-sized banks will escape tougher treatment, despite the fact that it was precisely mid-sized regional banks that were the focus of depositor jitters last year, when the likes of Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic collapsed. (Only this month New York Community Bank needed an emergency capital infusion.) Yes, the definition of what constitutes a large bank has been expanded to anything greater than $100bn, rather than $250bn, but that still leaves thousands of lenders — all but the top 99 — to pose a potential systemic risk.