Certainly, the Basle capital standards did the job for which they were designed, namely stopping the secular decline in bank capital levels that, by the late 1980s, threatened general safety and soundness.
But the scope and complexity of banking activities has proceeded apace during the last two decades or so, and standard capital measures, at least for our very largest and most complex organizations, are no longer adequate measures on which to base supervisory action for several reasons: * The regulatory capital standards apportion capital only for credit risk and, most recently, for market risk of trading activities.