U.S. banks and the Federal Reserve are battling over a new round of "stress tests" even before the annual exams get going later this fall, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The clash centers on the math regulators are using to produce the results. Bankers want more detail on how the calculations are made, and the Fed thus far has resisted disclosing more than it has already. A senior Fed supervision official, Timothy Clark, irked some bankers last month when he said at a private conference that they would not get additional information about the methodology. Smaller banks will soon have to grapple with similar requirements. Three U.S. banking regulators—the Fed, the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.—plan today to complete rules requiring smaller banks with more than $10 billion in assets to also run an internal stress test each year. That would widen the pool of test participants beyond the Fed's current requirement of $50 billion in assets, a group comprised of 30 banks.
