Lenders are poised to win concessions from central bank chiefs and global regulators over a debt limit they criticized as a blunt instrument that would penalize low-risk activities and curtail lending, Bloomberg News reported today. A revised leverage-ratio plan is set to be laxer than a draft published last year by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, said a person familiar with the scope of a Jan. 12 meeting of the group’s oversight body at which the measure will be discussed. The draft leverage rule published last year would have required banks to hold capital equivalent to at least 3 percent of their assets, without any possibility to take into account the riskiness of their investments. Stefan Ingves, the Basel committee’s chairman, has said that discussions in the group have focused on calibrating how banks should calculate the size of their assets, as opposed to reopening talks on the 3 percent figure.
