Dutch central bank President Nout Wellink said he is confident that Basel III, the new global bank rules, will make the global financial system more stable without strangling economic growth. "I am rather confident," Wellink said in an interview with Dow Jones Newswires on Monday.

Wellink, chairman of the Basel Committee and a member of the European Central Bank's governing committee, downplayed some bankers' concerns that the new rules, to be phased in, wouldn't prevent future crises and are too costly to implement.

"Bankers are complaining, saying it's costly and has unintended consequences," he said. "And, what I'm saying to them is, what you have done in the past is extremely costly, and when you talk about unintended consequences, these consequences are intended, most of them. We want you to change your business model."

Basel III, which was endorsed by the Group of 20 nations last year, requires banks world-wide to build up bigger capital buffers and deeper pools of liquidity to guard against future shocks. The new rules will become effective in 2018.

"It's quite clear that we do not want to kill sound, healthy banks, but what we want to kill is all the excesses that we've seen in the past," he said.

www.online.wsj.com