MOSCOW, Nov 8 (Reuters) - The Financial Stability Board, aglobal regulatory body, will name 29 banks worldwide that are"too big to fail" in an updated list that will be published nextweek, Russia's top international finance official said onFriday.
"Among the 29 banks there will be Chinese institutions,"Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Storchak said, referring to largebanks that will have to hold a larger capital buffer than theirsmaller local rivals from 2016.
After the failure of Wall Street bank Lehman Brothers in2008, taxpayers were called on to shore up lenders in Britainand the United States whose demise could have caused globalfinancial chaos.
Since then, governments have backed rules to make safer the"bulge bracket" banks whose balance sheets may be too large fornational governments to shore up on their own, hence the 'toobig to fail' label.
The FSB, which coordinates global regulation for the Groupof 20 leading economies, last year named Citigroup,Deutsche Bank, HSBC and JP Morgan Chase as the banks required to have the largest cushion.
Storchak, who was speaking at a news conference in Moscowafter a scheduled plenary meeting of the FSB, said that therewill be some replacements in the updated list.
An original list drafted in 2011 had 29 banks and wasshortened by one to 28 a year ago. Banks are required to holdadditional equity of between 1 and 2.5 percent of risk-weightedassets depending on which risk 'bucket' they are assigned to.
FSB Secretary General Svein Andresen told the same pressconference that priorities are to ensure that the globallysystemic important banks have adequate loss-absorbing capacityif they do fail.
"The point here is to ensure that when these financialinstitutions have exhausted their own equity capital, it is notthe public purse that pays for saving systematically importantbanks," Andresen said.
"That means that there need to be coordination arrangementsacross many countries to deal with the problems of these massiveinstitutions."
Some bankers say that solving the too-big-to-fail issue willbe hard but that success would make other post-crisis reformsalmost irrelevant.
The FSB is also working on addressing the problematic sideof shadow banking, paying increased attention to China, whereaccording to various estimates, shadow banking amounts to 40percent to 70 percent of gross domestic product.
China is to submit its own report on the size of thephenomenon by the end of the year, Andresen said. Storchak saidthe issue was problematic.
"Authors (of a report delivered at Friday's meeting) wereforced to conclude that the work of the Chinese statisticalservices until now does not make it possible to reliablyestimate the size of the problem," Storchak said.