Supervisory Framework for Measuring and Controlling Large Exposures

One of the key lessons from the financial crisis was that banks did not always consistently measure, aggregate and control exposures to single counterparties or to groups of connected counterparties across their books and operations. Throughout history there have been instances of banks failing due to concentrated exposures to individual counterparties (eg Johnson Matthey Bankers in the United Kingdom in 1984, the Korean banking crisis in the late 1990s). Large exposures regulation has been developed as a tool for limiting the maximum loss a bank could face in the event of a sudden counterparty failure to a level that does not endanger the bank’s solvency.