Under all the Basel approaches, a bank, as now, would allocate a risk-weight to each of its assets and off-balance-sheet positions and calculate a sum of the risk-weighted asset values. The capital requirement remains 8 percent of the institution's risk-weighted assets.
And a better understanding of the forces shaping recent developments in productivity - in particular, the causes of the pickup in labor productivity growth that began in the mid-1990s and the sources of the additional post-2000 surge - can help us put sensible bounds on possible future movements in productivity.