The day before notification letters were sent this year, the director of West Side Montessori, an uptown preschool, distributed a lengthy e-mail to parents full of boldface directives, capital-letter imperatives and repeated use of the term "immediately".
Lloyds's finance director, George Culmer, said a number of hurdles remained before clarity can be provided on the payments to shareholders, including the implementation of the ringfence recommended by the Independent Commission on Banking and European directives on capital.
That, in theory, still allows time for the European Union to draft and finalise a matching directive on capital adequacy for banks and financial firms, to be in force by January 2005.With Basel 2, bank supervisors are trying to do three main things.
For it has serious implications also for the unfinished agenda of creating a single European capital market.The directive has, after all, been a tortuous ten years in the making.
The European commission said it was too early to say if any country was in breach of the capital requirements directive, known as CRD IV, which includes the bonus cap.
Basle 2 must be turned into a third capital-adequacy directive (CAD 3), which may overlap with a bunch of other directives on solvency, large exposures and capital.
The Directive also imposes much greater capital requirements on venture firms, even as funds are shrinking to reflect the ease of creating startups now.
But the financial crisis has led to wholesale regulation that Britain struggles to resist.The bonus cap was not part of the European Commission's proposed directive to turn international standards on bank capital, known as Basel III, into law.
The new capital-adequacy directive promises numbing complexity and inconsistent application in 15 separate countries.
If Europe's new capital-adequacy directive is to be law in all EU countries by 2004, it must be drafted before that, in October this year.
While that is under way, it is dangerous to translate the Basle framework (the new version is called Basle 2) into European law in the form of a new capital-adequacy directive (called CAD 3).
