Banks and the stability of the international financial system

Summary Does today's banking scene pose a potential threat to the stability of the international financial system? The article discusses three possible sources of vulnerability of the international banking system: a major bank failure causing a general banking crisis via the extensive interbank linkages; the systemic risks allegedly inherent in certain new (as well as traditional) financial products; and the impact of external events such as debt crises, violent swings in exchange or interest rates, deregulation and recession. The author's conclusion is twofold: systemic risks clearly exist, but the probability of a major banking crisis tends to be greatly exaggerated. Banks not only survived the various crises of the seventies and eighties; they also learned in the process. Capital and reserves have been strengthened, provisions for country risk and for general contingencies have increased, supervision has been tightened and it is exercised on a comprehensive as well as a world-wide consolidated basis (i.e. including all contingent and off-balance liabilities, and all offshore activities). Assuming reasonably intelligent policies on the part of the monetary authorities and adequate international coordination, a general banking crisis can be avoided. Official rescue operations do, however, raise difficult questions of an ethical, political and economic nature.     

A COMPARISON OF PERFORMANCE INDICATORS FOR TRAINING AND ENTERPRISE COUNCILS IN THE UK

ABSTRACT ** : The use of performance indicators for the evaluation and comparison of efficiency in service provision in the public and related sectors of the economy is continuously developing. While they often represent a step forward, to the extent that they focus attention on the objectives of the organization in question, it is frequently suspected that they fail to take into account non-controllable environmental factors. To do so requires multivariate techniques of analysis. This paper compares the results of three such methods with the raw performance indicators. It confirms the importance of non-controllable factors but also shows that different multivariate methods give results which do not always agree. Understanding the properties of different approaches is essential in drawing conclusions about performance.     

Reduced Form Auctions Revisited

This note uses the Theorem of the Alternative to prove new results on the implementability of general, asymmetric auctions, and to provide simpler proofs of known results for symmetric auctions. The tradeoff is that type spaces are taken to be finite.