Increased monitoring of the financial institutions

The Central Bank and the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment are stepping up their monitoring of the financial institutions they regulate because of the falls in equity markets after the terrorist attacks in the US.

But neither authority sees any immediate need to make changes in their regulations.

This week the Financial Services Authority in the UK eased its resilience rules for life assurers and told the companies not to lend shares to short sellers.

Supervision in the Irish market is far less clear-cut than in the UK. The Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment authorises and supervises life and general insurance companies.

The Central Bank supervises the banks and investment funds, including the investment management subsidiaries of life assurance companies.

Investment funds are supervised in two different sections of the Central Bank - the IFSC and Funds Supervision division and the Securities and Exchange Supervision department.

The former supervised EU-wide collective investment products and IFSC firms and issued guidelines to the funds through the Dublin Financial Industry Association, a spokesman said. His division had no role in the supervision of funds with any insurance element, he said.

The latter supervises "discretionary portfolio managers", which covers most other fund managers and investment funds, which are managing funds on behalf of investors.

This regulation is carried out under the Investment Intermediaries Act. One Central Bank source said: "It's a bit tricky. It's complicated because there are so many different products and so many different pieces of legislation."

Asked to explain, as an example, who supervises Irish Life Investment Managers, a subsidiary of Irish Life Assurance, the source said the Central Bank Securities and Exchange department was the supervisor under the Investment Intermediary Act but the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment supervised its parent company.

As supervisor of life assurance companies, the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment said there was no need to relax resilience rules because the majority of company liabilities involved unit-linked policies, whose values fluctuated automatically with the markets and involved no ongoing risk to the company.

In the UK, the FSA temporarily relaxed its resilience rule so that life assures would not have to sell shares into falling equity markets for technical (resilience) reasons. Because life companies hold big equity portfolios, forced sales would put further downward pressure on equity markets.

The Central Bank has had one-to-one meetings with the banks to establish their levels of exposure to particular sectors of the economy worst affected by slowing economic growth and the financial fallout from the terrorist attacks.