Emergence of a core-periphery structure in a simple dynamic model of the interbank market

This paper studies a simple dynamic model of interbank credit relationships. Starting from a given balance sheet structure of a banking system with a realistic distribution of bank sizes, the necessity of establishing interbank credit connections emerges from idiosyncratic liquidity shocks. Banks initially choose potential trading partners randomly, but over time form preferential relationships via an elementary reinforcement learning algorithm. As it turns out, the dynamic evolution of this system displays a formation of a core-periphery structure with mainly the largest banks assuming the roles of money center banks mediating between the liquidity needs of many smaller banks. Statistical analysis shows that this evolving interbank market shares the majority of the salient characteristics of interbank credit relationship that have been put forth in recent literature. Preferential interest rates for borrowers with strong attachment to a lender may prevent the system from becoming extortionary and guarantee the survival of the small peripherical banks.     

Banking: Why Should the Taxpayer Bear the Risk?

A recent Government White Paper proposed increased state supervision to regulate the affairs of commercial banks. Forrest Capie, Professor of Economic History at the City University Business School in London, argues that price signals supplied by the market and the role of the central bank as the lender of last resort are sufficient guarantee of banking probity. Increased state supervision is unnecessary and damaging.     

Understanding the effects of growing central bank balance sheets on investment

What role does unconventional monetary policy – and particularly unconventional policies such as private asset purchases under quantitative easing or lender of last resort scheme – play in influencing economic growth directly? The literature looks at the effects of post-2007 central bank asset purchases on GDP growth and – in limited cases – on investment. Yet academics and central bankers have not tried to understand the effects of private securities purchases alone, while controlling for broader macroeconomic effects. This article summarises the existing literature, documenting the widespread use of private securities purchases by central banks across the world. The literature shows the potentially beneficial effects of these purchases, pointing the way for further scholarly work about central banks' private securities purchases.     

Systemic liquidity contagion in the European interbank market

Systemic liquidity risk, defined by the International Monetary Fund as “the risk of simultaneous liquidity difficulties at multiple financial institutions,” is a key topic in financial stability studies and macroprudential policy-making. In this context, the complex web of interconnections of the interbank market plays the crucial role of allowing funding liquidity shortages to propagate between financial institutions. Here, we introduce a simple yet effective model of the interbank market in which liquidity shortages propagate through an epidemic-like contagion mechanism on the network of interbank loans. The model is defined by using aggregate balance sheet information of European banks, and it exploits country and bank-specific risk features to account for the heterogeneity of financial institutions. Moreover, in order to obtain the European-wide topology of the interbank network, we define a block reconstruction method based on the exchange flows between the various countries. We show that the proposed contagion model is able to estimate systemic liquidity risk across different years and countries. Results suggest that our effective contagion approach can be successfully used as a viable alternative to more realistic but complicated models, which not only require more specific balance sheet variables with high time resolution but also need assumptions on how banks respond to liquidity shocks.

     

Clearinghouse loan certificates as a lender of last resort

Looking across multiple panics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this paper treats borrowing of clearinghouse loan certificates as borrowing from a lender of last resort. We evaluate individual bank use of clearinghouse loan certificates in New York City using bank balance sheet data. Bank capital ratios do not predict positive net borrowing. Lower pre-panic reserve ratios increased the probability of positive net borrowing of loan certificates. Bank borrowing behavior from a lender of last resort remained relatively constant across all three crises considered.     

关于商业银行流动性风险现状的度量

商业银行肩负着为市场提供流动性的重任,但银行同时也将整个社会的流动性冲击集中到了自己身上,存在着很大的风险,所以对其流动性风险的度量是极其重要的。本文试着采用静态指标法从国有商业银行和非国有股份制商业银行两个角度对商业银行流动性风险现状进行度量分析。     

Bank fee-based shocks and the U.S. business cycle

Efficient liquidity matching requires from banks to track external shocks (e.g., GDP growth shocks, stock market shocks and monetary policy shocks) in order to optimally allocate their assets between loans and other business lines. Profit maximizing banks have to rebalance their product-mix to take advantage of these changes. However, even though banking is cyclical, and contemporaneously reacts to shocks outside the banking sphere, there may also be some feedback effects at play, whereby bank changes, in turn, could affect economic and financial conditions. Generalizing the results of Marcucci and Quagliariello (2006, 2009), who indeed find an asymmetric impact of credit shocks on economic and financial time series in recession, we use a similar VAR framework to show that an even stronger feedback effect is prevalent for fee-based shocks. If the feedback effects of credit and fee-based shocks might have been both at play before the subprime crisis, the feedback effect of credit shocks seems to have faded away during the subprime crisis, whereas the feedback effect stemming from fee-based shocks has gained further strength.     

Securitization and optimal retention under moral hazard

Securitization improves liquidity in capital markets by allowing originators to remove issued loans from its balance sheet and use the proceeds for other purposes. Securitization is often suspected of being one of the main reasons for the recent financial crisis. One concern is that securitization leads to moral hazard in lender screening and monitoring. By selling loans to investors and removing them from their books, banks have a lesser incentive to carefully evaluate and monitor borrowers’ credit quality to ensure that they can repay their loans. One problem in the literature is that the analysis of securitization is very general and suffers from a lack of specific security design analysis under asymmetric information. We address the moral hazard problem using a principal–agent model where the investor is the principal and the lender is the agent. We show that the optimal contract must contain a retention clause in the presence of moral hazard. The optimal retention is affected by tranching and credit enhancement.     

What makes Islamic banks different? A multivariate approach

Using data from 8615 banks (including 123 Islamic banks) in 124 developed and developing countries for the period between 2006 and 2012, we examine the financial characteristics that distinguish between conventional and Islamic banks. As banks’ financial characteristics are multi-faceted concepts, our indicators are constructed using principal component analysis. We find that Islamic banks are more capitalized, more liquid and more profitable, but have more volatile earnings compared to US and European banks. However, similarities in terms of liquidity and earnings volatility are more noticeable when the sample is limited to banks operating in countries where both systems coexist. Finally, we find that higher capital makes the returns of Islamic banks more volatile, while higher liquidity decreases the profitability of conventional banks.     

Globalisation and monetary policy—A FAVAR analysis for the G7 and the eurozone

We assess the significance of global shocks for the world economy and national central banks and governments. More specifically, we investigate whether monetary policy has become less effective in the wake of financial globalization. We also analyze whether there is increasing uncertainty for central banks due to globalization-driven changes in the national economic structure. A FAVAR framework is applied to identify structural shocks on a world level and their effect on other global and national variables. To estimate our macroeconomic model, we employ quarterly data from Q1 1984 to Q4 2007 for the G7 countries and the euro area. According to our results, global liquidity shocks significantly influence the world economy and also various national economies. But common shocks driven by real estate prices and GDP also turn out to be significant at a global scale. These results prove to be robust across different specifications.     

Risk contagion in the banking network: New evidence from China

Based on data from 111 Chinese banks over the 2013–2016 period, this paper estimates the interbank bilateral lending matrix using the maximum entropy method. The estimated matrix is used to simulate the effects of credit and liquidity shocks on China’s banking network. Simulation results show that, under the extreme pressure scenario, the contagion arising from a liquidity shock is significantly stronger than the effect of a credit shock, indicating the importance of liquidity in the banking system. The contagion effect arising from a credit shock does not vary much over the sample period. However, the contagion effect arising from a liquidity shock decreases significantly, which could be attributed to contraction in interbank business due to stricter interbank business supervision. The simulation results also identify the most important and most vulnerable nodes of the banking system. An increase in the level of capital level can enhance the ability of banks to withstand credit and liquidity shocks. Our analysis also suggests that risk contagion faced by China’s banks varies across banking network structures.     

Contagion risk in the Czech financial system: A network analysis and simulation approach

This paper examines the potential for contagion within the Czech banking system via the channel of interbank exposures of domestic banks, enriched by a liquidity channel and an asset price channel, over the period March 2007 to June 2012. A computational model is used to assess the resilience of the Czech banking system to interbank contagion, taking into account the size and structure of interbank exposures as well as balance sheet and regulatory characteristics of individual banks in the network. The simulation results suggest that the potential for contagion due to credit losses on interbank exposures was rather limited. Even after the introduction of a liquidity condition into the simulations, the average contagion was below 3.8% of the remaining banking sector assets, with the exception of the period from December 2007 to September 2008. Activation of the asset price channel further increases the losses due to interbank contagion, showing that the liquidity of government bonds would be essential for the stability of Czech banks in stress situations. Finally, the simulation results for both idiosyncratic and multiple bank failure shocks suggest that the potential for contagion in the Czech banking system has decreased since the onset of the global financial crisis.     

Liquidity indicators,early warning signals in banks,and financial crises

This research compares the performance of three liquidity indicators, namely liquidity ratio (LiqR), liquidity creation (LiqC) and net stable funding difference (NSFD), for sending early warning signals for distressed banks. Recent evidence has shown that LiqR appears incapable of measuring the liquidity condition of banks. However, LiqC and NSFD have not yet been fully examined. Thus, which indicator is more useful in an early warning model becomes an interesting issue. We classify distressed banks as banks that have experienced a bank run, bailout, or failure. Sample data are collected from the United States and the European Union from before and after the financial crisis. We then estimate model predictive value using the sample before the crisis to predict liquidity shortages. Evidence shows that the academic (LiqC) and officially recommended indicators (NSFD) outperform LiqR as early warning signals. Furthermore, LiqC performs best when banks actively engage in income diversification but not fund diversification. Therefore, a well income-diversified bank with high LiqC tends to have high distress probability in the next period.     

Credit risk of subsidiaries of foreign banks in CEE countries: Impacts of the parent bank and home country economic environment

In this study, using dynamic panel data, we investigated the influences of the home country economic environment and parent bank condition on the credit risk of foreign banks in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. We concentrated on the international transmission of credit risk through the internal capital market of multinational banks. Our theoretical assumptions follow studies that document how the parent bank condition and home country macroeconomic environment affect lending in subsidiaries in CEE countries. However, our results go one step further. We provide evidence that these relationships are reflected in subsidiaries’ credit risk in CEE countries. Our results suggest that the size and profitability of the parent bank have negative influences, while the liquidity and credit risk of the parent bank have positive influences on the subsidiaries’ credit risk. Moreover, the GDP growth in the parent bank’s country has a negative effect on the credit risk of the subsidiary, while the lending rate and liquidity in the parent bank country cause growth in the credit risk. These results indicate a new channel of international risk transfer from parent bank countries to host countries through foreign-owned banks.     

Liquidity,bank runs,and fire sales under local thinking

We examine the implications on banking crises when markets are populated by agents that neglect tail risks and form expectations conditioned on a favorable subset of possible states of the economy. We find that optimal bank liquidity is lower than would be the case under rational expectations, and, consequently, the banking system is more vulnerable to adverse shocks, which lead to bank runs. Asset pledgeability of surviving banks is also affected so that their capacity to raise external funds for purchasing assets of distressed banks is weakened. Further, we examine the case when asset returns are correlated through securitization. In this case adverse shocks are felt uniformly across the banking sector and banks that survive with the help of a public liquidity backstop will become risk-averse and reluctant to purchase distressed assets. Finally, we explore a government funded asset purchase program, that is implemented with an asset price target.     

Too Big to Fail: UK Financial Services Reform in History and Policy

Previous banking crises have been used as opportunities for new and beneficial developments in regulation and in the market itself. The global financial crisis should be seen as such an occasion. There is a need to refine the role of the central bank as lender of last resort and also to reform deposit insurance so that it only applies to a limited range of bank accounts.     

Resiliency of the limit order book

This study contributes to our understanding of the liquidity replenishment process in limit order book markets. A measure of resiliency is proposed and quantified for different liquidity shocks through the impulse response functions generated from a high frequency vector autoregression. The model reveals a rich set of liquidity dynamics. Liquidity shocks were found to have immediate detrimental effects on other dimensions of liquidity but the replenishment process generally occurs quickly, indicating limit order books are resilient. Cross-sectionally, resiliency is found to be consistently high across all large stocks, consistent with competition for liquidity provision coming from computerized algorithms. For other stocks, greater variation in resiliency is observed, indicating more selective participation by these liquidity providers.     

Forecasting distress in cooperative banks: The role of asset quality

This paper analyzes the drivers of financial distress that were experienced by small Italian cooperative banks during the latest deep recession, focusing mainly on the importance of bank capital as a predictor of bankruptcy for Italian nonprofit banks. The analysis aims to build an early-warning model that is suitable for this type of bank.The results reveal non-monotonic effects of bank capital on the probability of failure. In contrast to distress models for for-profit banks, non-performing loans, profitability, liquidity, and management quality have a negligible predictive value. The findings also show that unreserved impaired loans have an important impact on the probability of bank distress. Moreover, the loan–loss ratio provision on substandard loans constitutes a suitable antibody against bank distress. Overall, the results are robust in terms of both the methodology (i.e., frequentist and Bayesian approaches) and the sample used (i.e., cooperative banks in Italy and euro-area countries).     

Should the Central and Eastern European Accession Countries Adopt the EURO Before or After Accession?

I analyse the option of unilateral euroisation for Central and Eastern Europe. The thorny questions of losing seigniorage and losing the lender of last resort are explicitly addressed. It is found that the option of unilateral euroisation might be quite inviting for some countries. This is certainly the case if one takes into account the difficulties thrown up by the Maastricht–criteria. It is argued that unilateral euroisation provides an elegant way out of the catch of the official EMU-accession path. The EU has, however, expressed explicitly its enmity against euroisation. I think this is a policy error. It should be at least a genuine policy option for all countries concerned. At best the EU should stimulate euroisation by embedding it in a broader and more embracing framework that would support integration and ultimately accession to the EU of the whole of Central and Eastern Europe.     

The accuracy of IMF crises nowcasts

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) provides loans to countries in economic crises as a lender of last resort. IMF loan approvals are tied to policy reforms and quantitative targets that reflect the IMF’s crisis assessment. An extensive literature scrutinizes the efficacy of IMF loan programs, instead, we examine the accuracy of the IMF’s crisis assessments (nowcasts) that predicate program designs. Analyzing an unprecedented 602 IMF loan programs from 1992 to 2019, we contradict previous findings that IMF nowcasts are generally optimistic. Disentangling the structure of the IMF’s nowcast bias, we find the IMF systematically overestimates high-growth recoveries GDPs, while low-growth recoveries for low-income countries (LICs) are underestimated. In contrast, non-LICs’ nowcasts exhibit no statistically significant optimistic and pessimistic bias. Interestingly, shorter nowcast horizons do not improve accuracy, and GDP growth nowcasts improved substantially since 2013, while inflation nowcasts remain inefficient. We also isolate the sources of IMF nowcast inefficiencies according to ((i) program objectives, ((ii) program conditionality type, ((iii) geographic regions, ((iv) global crises, and ((v) geopolitics (elections, conflicts, and disasters).