Most Constraining CCAR; Who Is Building The Most?

The Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR) and the Dodd-Frank act stress test (DFAST) that goes with it assess banks on two different metric, excess capital and excess leverage. While a poor result on either metric can prevent a bank from going forward on its capital return plans, the two are far from equivalent and banks that were limited by leverage have a few more options than those that were limited by capital.

“The banks that have the Tier 1 leverage ratio as their limiting factor, such as JPM, BAC and AXP, can grow the amount of common equity they can return in the upcoming CCAR test simply...