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For bankers, traders and deal makers at the world's major banks, there may be nowhere to hide from new restrictions on how much they can earn. Rules announced Thursday by the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Department will limit and change pay packages at thousands of financial institutions while at the same time seeking to restrict the risks these firms can take. One criticism of the pay restrictions is that they will push the most talented executives to take positions at foreign-owned banks overseas, but most of the countries that host major financial hubs are considering tougher restrictions. The Financial Stability Board, a group of central bankers and other regulators from more than 20 major countries, issued recommendations before last month's G-20 meeting calling for stricter controls on pay, including deferring more than half of the pay of top executives for a number of years. The group said that for the standards to work, they 'must be rigorously and consistently implemented by significant financial institutions throughout the world.' This month in the U.K., where London is the biggest financial-services competitor to New York, the government got its biggest banks and 11 foreign competitors operating in Britain to change the way their bankers are compensated in line with rules laid out by U.K. regulator the Financial Services Authority and the G-20. Under these rules banks must have an independent committee submit annual compensation reports to the FSA, and senior executives and employees who manage risk must defer 40% to 60% of their compensation over three years, and at least 50% should be in shares. U.K. banks are likely to comb through new U.S. rules on banker compensation released Thursday to measure their severity against those set earlier this month in Britain. Some European countries have gone even further than the U.K. and U.S. France, for example, has called for a cap on all bankers bonuses. In Asia, banks that are big enough to have operations in the U.S. or U.K. will fall under the same pay restrictions that affect their Western counterparts, though pay packages at China's giant lenders as well as smaller Asian banks are generally modest by Wall Street standards. Asia's big sovereign wealth funds don't necessarily offer huge pay packages either. Singapore's Temasek Holdings Pte. Ltd. already claws back bonuses when the state-owned investment house reports what it calls 'negative wealth added' in a bad year, as it did in the 12 months ended March 31. Besides pay, regulators around the world are pushing banks to hold more capital and take fewer risks so that taxpayer bailouts won't be necessary in the future. On Thursday, the FSA issued new proposals that would ultimately make it more expensive for banks to do business in the U.K. Officials at some of the U.K.'s largest banks expressed concern that higher capital requirements might limit the ability of banks to lend, potentially crimping the economic recovery. 一些英国最主要银行的管理人士表示了担忧,他们说,更高的资本要求可能会限制银行的贷款能力,从而可能阻碍经济复苏。
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