Banks & cash

Financial regulators and central bank governors from the world's biggest economies have made history by agreeing rules on the minimum quantities of cash and liquid or sellable assets that all banks must hold. It is an attempt to make banks less vulnerable to the kind of runs that shattered Northern Rock and Lehman Bros.

I still feel that Northern Rock should never have been saved, but that is another story.

There is an oddity at the heart of today's historic agreement by the oversight body of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, which for the first time will impose new minimum requirements for the amount of cash and liquid assets that banks all over the world will have to hold.

The oddity is that most banks already hold considerably more than the new minimum requirement - but the reason they already pass this threshold is because we continue to live in strange and perilous times, with many Western economies parlously weak and the financial system still stressed.

As pointed out by Sir Mervyn King - the governor of the Bank of England who chairs the oversight body of the Basel Committee, which is known as the Group of Governors and Heads of Supervision (GHOS) - the fundamental cause of the crises at these banks and others was that they had too little capital to absorb losses.