Just 51 hours separate the closing of the New York Stock Exchange on Friday afternoon from the opening of the Tokyo bourse the following Monday. How bankers wish it were longer. Regulators want it to be possible for any bank to fail without causing chaos or taking a bail-out from taxpayers. To that end, they are demanding that big financial firms draw up plans that would make it easier to dismember them or start winding them down during the brief weekly hiatus in trading. That is proving tricky. This week the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (fdic), the American regulator that takes charge of failing banks, rejected the "living wills" of the local subsidiaries of three of the world's biggest banks: bnp Paribas, hsbc and rbs. Last year it declared inadequate the plans of all 11 of the banks with more than $250 billion in assets in America, including Bank of America, Barclays, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and ubs. The second lot have until July 1st to revise their submissions; the first three until the end of the year. If any of the revised plans are rejected, regulators will gain extraordinary powers to stem the growth of the banks in question or break them up.
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