EACB generally welcomes EBA’s and ESMA’s intentions to establish principles focused on reference rates and other benchmark-setting-processes in the EU. Benchmarks demonstrate traits and characteristics of a public good for the capital market and are therefore of fundamental importance as a financial market infrastructure to allow our banks to finance and support the real economy. These processes are dependent on the confidence invested of all market participants and therefore integer processes are needed to provide trustworthy benchmarks.
Given Commissioner Michel Barnier’s recent comments on an upcoming EU regulation on benchmark setting in the coming months, we would clearly favour to put more importance on the swift implementation of such regulation (guided by the upcoming IOSCO recommendations) instead of an interim solution of non-binding principles as currently proposed by EBA and ESMA. In our view this approach will ensure a more balanced and coherent impact assessment that is inevitable to any regulation which will most certainly have complex economic repercussions.
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