The Bank of England announced the results of its 2017 stress test of the UK banking system.
For the first time since the Bank of England launched its stress tests in 2014, no bank needs to strengthen its capital position as a result of the stress test. The 2017 stress test shows the UK banking system is resilient to deep simultaneous recessions in the UK and global economies, large falls in asset prices and a separate stress of misconduct costs.
The economic scenario in the test is more severe than the global financial crisis. Significant improvements in asset quality since the crisis mean that the loss rate on banks’ loans in the stress test is the same as in the financial crisis.
In the test, banks incur losses of around £50 billion in the first two years of the stress. This scale of loss, relative to their assets, would have wiped out the common equity capital base of the UK banking system ten years ago. The stress test shows these losses can now be absorbed within the buffers of capital banks have on top of their minimum requirements.
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