“The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has today published a proposed supervisory framework for measuring and controlling large exposures. One of the key lessons from the financial crisis is that banks did not always consistently measure, aggregate and control exposures to single counterparties across their books and operations. And throughout history there have been instances of banks failing due to concentrated exposures to individual counterparties (eg Johnson Matthey Bankers in the UK in 1984, the Korean banking crisis in the late 1990s). Large exposures regulation has arisen as a tool for containing the maximum loss a bank could face in the event of a sudden counterparty failure to a level that does not endanger the bank’s solvency.”