IIF executive blasts "conservative" Basel Committee

Yesterday at a press conference held at the Institute of International Finance´s spring membership meeting in Madrid, a vice chairman criticized recent decisions taken by the Basel Committe on Banking Supervision as overly "conservative."

"We see signs that elements of the Accord could be moving in an overly conservative direction," said Cees Maas, IIF vice chairman and treasurer, and vice chairman and chief financial officer of the ING Group in the Netherlands. "As work progresses by diverse supervisory groups, there appears to be a tendency to make discrete aspects of the complex of capital issues more conservative and base these on apparently different assumptions than the Accord overall. If this goes too far, it