By Sinead Cruise and Lawrence White
LONDON (Reuters) -Britain’s banking stability watchdog has not yet seen reason to require banks to report daily liquidity levels despite the market chaos unleashed by U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs, Prudential Regulation Authority CEO Sam Woods told a hearing of lawmakers on Tuesday.
“What we’ve done is step up monitoring of the firms, which we always do in these situations. We’ve not though taken it to the highest level,” Woods said, pointing to recovery in share prices, a lack of tension in funding markets and broadly unchanged customer behaviours.
Woods’ hearing before the cross-party Treasury Select Committee came as HSBC warned that loan demand and credit quality could suffer from Trump’s global trade war, in some of the most concrete detail yet on how the tariffs are hitting banks’ businesses worldwide.
Despite the risks of an economic slowdown later this year, Britain’s left-leaning Labour government has been vocal on how banks and financial regulators should support its growth agenda, shifting away from the risk-averse mentality that prevailed after the 2008 financial crisis.
To that end, Britain will unveil a “concierge” service for potential international investors this summer, Woods said, as part of a broader bid to encourage more investment in the country.
Britain can safely pull back on some financial regulation, he told lawmakers, but any push to greatly reduce the capitalisation of the banking sector would require significant debate given the risks.
(Reporting by Sinead Cruise and Lawrence White; Editing by Kirsten Donovan and Jan Harvey)
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