Since 1999, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, which consists of the bank supervisors of almost all developed countries, has been struggling to adopt a new capital adequacy framework for commercial banks. The Basel Committee’s bank capital proposal, known as Basel II, has been amended several times and still has not been universally accepted. Indeed, after some recent testing, the differences among bank supervisors may have grown even wider.

At this conference, sponsored by Booz Allen Hamilton and presented jointly with the Professional Risk Managers’ International Association, panelists will consider many of the issues associated with the current proposal and also address why no global consensus among bank supervisors has emerged in the past seven years.