Federal Reserve System March 22, 2013 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

The OCC, Board, and the FDIC (collectively, the ``agencies'') are issuing final guidance on leveraged lending. This guidance outlines for agency-supervised institutions high-level principles related to safe-and-sound leveraged lending activities, including underwriting considerations, assessing and documenting enterprise value, risk management expectations for credits awaiting distribution, stress- testing expectations, pipeline portfolio management, and risk management expectations for exposures held by the institution. This guidance applies to all financial institutions supervised by the OCC, Board, and FDIC that engage in leveraged lending activities. The number of community banks with substantial involvement in leveraged lending is small; therefore, the agencies generally expect community banks to be largely unaffected by this guidance.