Quarterly disclosures little read
The new regime of quarterly reporting imposed on banks under the third pillar of the Basel 2 approach to bank regulation is producing a flow of additional disclosure from banks, especially the larger ones following the most advanced methods of working out their capital requirements.The deadline for publishing the reports, under APRA rules, was the end of last week.Yet this flow is generating little attention. In the period since National Australia Bank dashed out its report for the December 2008 a month ago all banks have had to produce their "pillar 3" reports. Five - the four majors plus Macquarie Bank - published their reports via the ASX while every other bank simply published the document at their website.From this newsletter's partial review of the output of the sell-side analysts at investment banks none have taken much notice of the additional disclosures, fragments of which are pretty interesting (such as the escalating level of impaired assets at Macquarie, of which more details are reported below).Nor have any other media found themes worth reporting in the data.