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Christian Clausen, president of the European Banking Federation, said regulators need to rethink an approach he warned will bury the industry under a mountain of rules with little coherence.
Clausen, who is also the chief executive officer of Nordea Bank, said his group plans to take up the issue with the new European Commission and parliament in an effort to prevent regulators adding more rules to the existing framework.
“We need to have a serious talk,” he said yesterday in an interview in Stockholm. “We need to calibrate, we cannot just add on. I think it is going beyond reason.”
The stress tests by the European Central Bank and the European Banking Authority are due to be released on Oct. 26. The examinations will establish the financial health of Europe’s biggest banks and provide a master document from which the ECB can start its supervisory work on Nov. 4.
Since dragging the global economy into the worst slump since the Great Depression, banks have spent the past half-decade adjusting to the biggest overhaul in financial regulation in 80 years. Clausen said that work should now be regarded as finished.
“We have solved the issue now, the too-big-too-fail, we have solved the issue on most of them,” he said. “Maybe there are a few left -- let’s handle them -- but no more big reforms, I think, no more good ideas.”