"While the potential risks to financial stability arising from
Brexit and from asset valuations have not fully crystallized
yet, I suspect that they will both need to be among the major
areas of focus for the FPC in 2018," Elisabeth Stheeman told
parliament's Treasury Committee.
Banks, insurers and asset managers operating in Britain are
already applying for licenses to work in the European Union
after Brexit in March 2019, forcing them to decide how many
people to move.
"It's important to create some kind of certainty for firms,
otherwise they may be pushed into taking decisions," Stheeman
said.
Some policymakers have argued that the EU would come off worse
than Britain's financial services sector if there is no UK-EU
trade deal after Brexit.
Stheeman said it was too early to say if this is true, and
argued against fragmenting clearing in derivatives which, she
said, would bump up costs for customers across the world.
She gave a blunt warning on commercial real estate in central
London, telling lawmakers that prices there were "very fully
valued, to say the least", and should be a "wake-up call".
Stheeman is a former chief operating officer for divisions of
Morgan Stanley <MS.N> and real estate company Jones Lang LaSalle
<JLL.N>.
She now serves on the supervisory boards of German and French
real estate companies and is a member of the supervisory boards
of German and French property companies and Germany's
real-estate focused lender Aareal Bank <ARLG.DE>.
Stheeman said she would recuse herself from FPC discussions of
real estate markets in the EU to avoid conflicts of interest, as
well as British government gilt issuance, as her husband is
chief executive of the UK Debt Management Office.
The FPC does not urgently need any extra powers to direct
regulators to take action in addition to existing powers over
banks' capital levels and loan-to-income ratios on household
mortgages, she said.
(Reporting by Huw Jones and David Milliken; Editing by Raissa
Kasolowsky)
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