WASHINGTON, September 19 (Global Risk Regulator) – US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson said when America gets through current difficulties, the next task must be to improve the country’s financial regulation so that the excesses that caused the credit crisis do not reoccur.

WASHINGTON, September 18 (Global Risk Regulator) – America needs a more modern regulatory scheme for the twenty-first century of the kind detailed by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson earlier this year, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said today.

LONDON, September 17 (Global Risk Regulator) – Good progress has been made with efforts aimed at tackling accounting issues highlighted by the credit crisis, according to David Tweedie, who leads the body that sets global accounting standards

MADRID, September 17 (Global Risk Regulator) – The world’s stock market regulators today urged a consistent regulatory approach to overseeing credit rating agencies, the firms whose methods of assessing creditworthiness have come under fire as a result of the credit crisis.

NICE, France, September 15 (Global Risk Regulator) – As top US investment bank Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy protection, European Union policymakers meeting routinely at the weekend failed to agree on how the EU block might act to rescue a foundering institution.

Regulators propose new capital charges for a range of trading book risks. But nobody yet knows how much extra capital will be needed By Melvyn Westlake

European Commission is about to make a third attempt to introduce regulations aimed at curbing excesses in structured finance

The European Commission’s end-June proposals to deal with perceived failing in the structured finance market could have several negative consequences, concludes an analysis by the Fitch rating agency. Under this proposal, European banks could only invest in securitisations (or other risk transfer credit products) where the arranger or manager retained 10% of the exposure. The intention is to better align the incentives of the arrangers/managers with those of investors by obliging the former to retain an interest in the product (“keep some skin in the game”).

How another failure to comprehend fully the risks involved in complex financial instruments contributed to the credit crisis

NEW YORK – A strong call for financial institutions to undertake a raft of “collective and concerted industry-wide initiatives” to limit damage from future market crises is being made by an influential group of senior bank executives. In a report published in August* they say that such reform initiatives may require market participants to make costly investments in infrastructure (human capital and technology), as well as “change business processes, and accept changes to market practices, that in the past have generated sizeable revenues, but at the cost of weakening the underlying foundation of the markets.”