Incentive Conflict in the International Regulatory Agreement on Risk-Based Analysis

Intergovernmental regulatory cooperation is fundamentally cartel behavior and subject to principal-agent conflict. In negotiating the 1988 risk-based capital agreement, most Western officials' unstated goal may arguably be described as postponing the pain of adapting their domestic regulatory schemes to successor officials' watch. They hoped they could buy time by raising book-value capital requirements for Japanese banks. Efficient-market theory indicates that the market value rather than the book value of a bank's capital impacts its funding cost. It also clarifies that restrictions on domestic and foreign bank competition for Japanese deposits unfairly enhance Japanese banks' ability to intermediate that country's massive capital exports.