Hacker News Reader

This is a somewhat minor point, but it surprised me that the edit: Danish reserve requirement has been raised to 1%. In the US, it's at roughly 10% and has historically been between 8 and 12% for large banks. Does anyone more familiar with Danish banking know why their reserve requirement is so low compared to ours?

View on HN

It's Denmark, not the Netherlands we are talking about. Your intuition seems correct [1]. The 1% capital requirement in the Reuters article must be an add-on requirement and is to low to be the stand-alone requirement. Fitch put Danske at 4.2% Basel III 'fully loaded' last summer. The wiki points out how diverse the calculations can turn out so that it's pretty much pears and apples comparing these internationally.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_requirement

The 1% refers to a specific sub-segment of the overall capital requirements. This would be on top of any normal Basel III requirements and is typically marked as a "discretionary" capital buffer to be set by the state in question.

EDIT: Ah, nuts, meant to reply to grandparent rather than parent. Oh well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com