Chancellor Merkel's Cabinet approved a draft bill today that would force deposit banks to separate proprietary trading, lending and guarantees to hedge funds as well as HFT, when associated activities exceed €100 billion or 20 per cent of the balance sheet.
“Based on the figures for 2011, around 10-12 banks in Germany will be affected” by the legislation, Schäuble told reporters in Berlin today. “We’re empowering BaFin to go beyond the general rule in individual cases when necessary.”
The bill is the latest measure taken by Merkel to regulate financial markets after curbing manager pay, banning some short-selling and making banks pay into a resolution fund. Under the bill, top managers at banks face prison sentences of up to five years or a penalty of as much as €11 million if they intentionally violate rules and the banks that employ them get into trouble as a result.
Punishing financial market participants with jail terms is not “draconian, but proper”, Deputy Finance Minister Steffen Kampeter said yesterday in an interview. Legal solutions shouldn’t be restricted to limiting bonuses, he said.
“The package on financial market regulation passed by Cabinet today follows the wrong path”, Andreas Schmitz, BdB president, said in an e-mailed statement. “The draft law weakens Germany as a financial centre and the proven universal banking model in several ways. It is primarily the product of electioneering.”
The government aims to pass the draft in the lower house of parliament and gain upper-house approval before the summer. Kampeter said that he’s confident the opposition-controlled upper house, or Bundesrat, will back the measures because there’s “consensus not only among German legislators but among the German population that we should not wait for the rest of the world to regulate and address these problems, but to step forward".
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