Germany's biggest bank, Deutsche Bank, plans to restructure its US operations to sidestep new regulations that could have forced it to raise billions in new capital, a report said on April 13.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the bank wanted to operate with a thinner capital cushion than the new rules envisioned.
Contacted by AFP, Deutsche Bank declined to comment. Deutsche executives feared the bank would have to put up as much as 20 billion dollars in new capital to offset losses in its US unit that have left it undercapitalised, the newspaper said, citing an internal company document.
The bank worried such a move would have hit its own capital levels. The restructuring would see its Taunus Corp holding, with some $373 billion in assets, become a simple subsidiary of its parent company while maintaining the same activities, sources told the newspaper.
Deutsche is the second major European bank to engineer such a move after Britain's Barclays changed the status of its US bank holding company to erase a capital shortfall possibly in excess of $12 billion, the paper said.
For the past decade, the Federal Reserve has not required the US arms of foreign banks to meet the same capital requirements as US banks, so long as their foreign parent companies are financially healthy.
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