Global regulators spent more than a decade trying to ensure that a large bank could fail without any government support. Despite this year’s bank failures, they are still working on it, the Wall Street Journal reported. Global regulators are reviewing the March failures, including Credit Suisse’s collapse and Swiss officials’ decision to push UBS to acquire its rival in a deal with billions of public money, people familiar with the probe said. Swiss officials chose to sidestep the postcrisis plan for global megabanks, under which Credit Suisse would have been wound down by regulators or restructured into a new entity. In the U.S., regulators are considering new rules as soon as this month that would force midsize banks to add to their financial cushions in case of insolvency. The March failures of Silicon Valley Bank and another midsize bank prompted officials to take extraordinary steps to promise depositors they could access their money. The tumult was far less severe than the financial crisis of 2007-09, when hundreds of banks went under and Washington injected hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to keep the system afloat. Still, the bank failures in the U.S. and in Switzerland have exposed gaps in the regulatory regime built up after the 2008 bailouts, some officials say.
