Big US banks are warning that new rules on their funding risk damaging the more than $7tn repo market, where financial institutions borrow against government bonds, threatening to destabilise one of the more important financial markets.
JPMorgan Chase analysts estimate big banks in Europe, Japan and the US would have to hold at least $180bn of additional regulatory capital to cover their borrowings in the repo market under new leverage ratio rules proposed by US and international banking regulators in recent weeks.
The market helps fund trillions of dollars of securities and financial transactions every day, but it has also come under regulatory scrutiny after a pullback in repo financing helped spur Lehman Brothers’ collapse in 2008.