With the agreements reached in July and September at meetings of the Governors and Heads of Supervision (GHOS) in Basel, the structure and basic elements of Basel III are  4  BIS Review 149/2010  clear. Details are still being worked out by the Basel Committee. Then, of course, the U.S. banking agencies will need to implement Basel III through domestic capital regulations.
Basel III is not a perfect agreement, of course. There are things we would have done differently if we were writing a capital regulation on our own. There will surely be some technical challenges in implementing it. It does not really address some pre-crisis problems in capital regulation such as pro-cyclicality. But it is a major step forward for capital regulation.