The following article is an edited transcript of an interview late last year with Dominic Crawley, global head of financial services ratings with Standard & Poor's, and Peter Sikora, senior director of financial institutions ratings with S&P in Melbourne.Ian Rogers: There were some estimates from the Bank for International Settlements, a month or so back, about the amount of capital that the top 102 banks required, and the figure was in the order of €370 billion in order to meet the new capital standards.  I think they estimated it to be 11 months' profit, and then there was another group of banks that needed a smaller amount of capital. What do you think of that estimate?Dominic Crawley: It sounds broadly reasonable and correct, and it's interesting that you refer to the 11 months of profit. The banks have various levers they can pull to get to required capital levels. The required capital levels that the BIS has come with out are probably assuming some kind of anticipated risk asset growth.So banks can reduce their overall risk asset size. I think overall, it is a reasonable number. The key thing is that the actual progression towards the targets that have to be reached (in terms of growing total capital size).  It isn't as if they've slipped behind. Their run rate, so to speak, is pretty good.Peter Sikora: And just to remind you that S&P looks at regulatory ratios in terms of are they being met or not, but we really fundamentally tie our capital assessment to our own modelling.Ian Rogers:    Yeah, which is a good lead in to a wide issue I'd like to talk about, which is everything that's been learned over the course of the crisis. Why is thinking about how much capital that's needed in the industry today so different from six years ago?Dominic Crawley:    Well that's a good question. Clearly the severity of the losses that were incurred in the last cycle were extreme. The high impact type of losses that they suffered, and the damage to the real economy has clearly meant that there's been a structural as opposed to a cyclical change in mindset of governments. Central [to the change in mindset] has been the clear intent to avoid next time the moral hazard of too big to fail. Governments don't want to be in a position to bail out next time, so how do they deal with that challenge? Well, the core direction is to regulate a lot more tightly about what banks can do and what they can't do within regulation. They will have them hold a lot more capital, they will make sure that more capital is purer capital as opposed to many of the sort of up and lower tier II type hybrid instruments that have been issued in the past. So why are they asking for a lot more capital than there was before?  Because they fundamentally want them to be able to stand on their own feet without being