LONDON, May 22 (Reuters) – European Union regulators have
proposed tighter safeguards on sales of the type of securitised
debt that became untradable in the financial crisis, forcing
taxpayers to rescue banks.

Securitisation is the consolidation of loans such as
mortgages and credit cards and selling them as bonds to
investors, with loan repayments paying the interest.

LONDON, May 21 (Reuters) – The European Union is nearing a
deal on long-delayed insurance rules that the bloc has touted as
a regulatory benchmark for the world to follow, regulatory and
policy officials said.

The rules, known as “Solvency II”, will seek to improve the
method for deciding how much capital an insurer must hold as a
safety buffer by better assessing risks and liabilities from
customer policies.

LONDON (Reuters) – EU regulators confirmed on Tuesday they will cap bonuses of bankers earning more than 500,000 euros a year and added other conditions to make the pay ceiling harder to smash.

The headline figure was leaked last Friday, triggering warnings by banks in the European Union that they may lose staff to other parts of the world, and that London, the bloc’s top financial center, could be damaged.

LONDON/STRASBOURG, France, May 20 (Reuters) – A European
Union law up for a vote on Monday will only fully shield
taxpayers from bailing out troubled banks if there is a global
framework as well, a top UK regulator said on Monday.

Bank of England Deputy Governor Paul Tucker said the EU law
on bank recovery and resolution would be a milestone towards a
global system and help convince markets that governments were no
longer willing to rescue “too big to fail” lenders.

LONDON, May 17 (Reuters) – European Union officials will
next week propose capping financial sector pay above 500,000
euros, accountancy firm PwC said on Friday, suggesting the
world’s most stringent curbs for the industry will affect far
more bankers than previous rules.

The European Banking Authority will next week for the first
time put a number on where it would like its planned bonus cap
to start and PwC said in a statement that the threshold would be
set at 500,000 euros.

LONDON, May 16 (Reuters) – Supervisors across the European
Union will examine the way that top banks classify and value
loans and other assets to ensure that the stress tests they
conduct do a better job of finding any problems.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) said on Thursday it
will set out guidelines for the review, which will delay the
bloc’s next round of stress tests until 2014.

LONDON/NEW YORK, May 16 (Reuters) – Company balance sheets
could swell by trillions of dollars under an international plan
being pursued by two accounting bodies to show more clearly the
cost of leasing everything from photocopiers to property.

If the revised draft the International Accounting Standards
Board and U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board issued on
Thursday is adopted, tens of thousands of firms worldwide will
have to add all leases over a year to their balance sheets.

LONDON, May 15 (Reuters) – Financial regulators have given
themselves until September to try to resolve differences over
how to supervise derivatives markets in the wake of the
financial crisis, a U.S. watchdog said on Wednesday.

Leaders of the Group of 20 economies (G20) pledged in 2009
to make off-exchange traded derivatives like credit default
swaps more transparent. They wanted rules in place by the end of
2012, but this has proved difficult to achieve.

LONDON, May 13 (Reuters) – Two of the world’s biggest market
infrastructure companies are joining forces to help banks track
down enough cash to underpin their derivatives trades, spurred
by new regulation that aims to make safe a traditionally risky
area of business.

Brussels-based Euroclear and the Depository Trust & Clearing
Corp (DTCC) of New York have agreed to build a new platform to
combine available collateral into a single pool.

NEW YORK/LONDON, May 2 (Reuters) – Corporations may have to
shoulder trillions of dollars of new balance-sheet liabilities
under an accounting change for leases that is meeting stiff
resistance from businesses in a test of international accounting
standard-setters’ resolve.

Already pared back once to reduce its impact on real estate
leasing, a proposed new international lease accounting standard,
under development for years, will reach a turning point in May
when standard setters unveil a detailed draft rule.