
Rather than crafting new reform recommendations, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) is shifting its focus toward implementing measures that global policymakers have developed, primarily in response to the financial crisis.
In a letter to the finance ministers and central bank governors of the G20, ahead of the group’s upcoming meeting on Feb. 26-27, the FSB chair, Klaas Knot, said that after crafting reforms to deal with the vulnerabilities that were exposed by the financial crisis, it’s pivoting to pushing the adoption of those reforms at the national level.
“When fully implemented, the reforms will contribute to a financial system that is better able to absorb adverse shocks and to facilitate economic activity,” it said — noting that its efforts aim to enable growth and innovation, alongside enhanced stability, by providing policy clarity in areas such as the emerging crypto sector.
In the year ahead, the FSB’s work on reform implementation will include a strategic review of its major post-crisis reforms that will seek to, “identify areas where improvements can be made in the tools we use to ensure consistent, global implementation of agreed reforms.”
Alongside its efforts to encourage implementation of its reforms, the FSB said that it will also be continuing to work to enhance oversight of the shadow banking sector by addressing gaps in the data on the sector, and dealing with other sources of systemic risk that were revealed by the onset of the pandemic — such as enhancing the resilience of money market funds, dealing with liquidity mismatches in open-ended funds and strengthening margining practices and liquidity management in the fund sector.
The letter indicated that the FSB plans to deliver recommendations to address financial stability risks from leverage in the shadow banking sector in July.
“As this sector continues to grow and evolve, so too does the need to enhance the monitoring of risks and the preparedness of authorities and market participants to respond to periods of market stress,” it said, noting that it continues to face challenges in collecting data on investment funds’ margin and leverage.
“Our work plan for this year aims to examine the most salient of these data challenges so that we can better understand and mitigate vulnerabilities in the [non-bank] sector,” it said.
Other issues on the FSB’s agenda include enhancing operational and cyber resilience in the financial sector, and dealing with the sector’s climate-related risks.
“The FSB’s work on climate this year will focus on operationalizing our analytical framework and toolkit to better assess such vulnerabilities and risks to global financial stability,” it said.