Are rules and boundaries sufficient to limit harmful central bank discretion? Lessons from Europe

Marvin Goodfriend׳s (2014) insightful, informative and provocative work explains concisely and convincingly why the Fed needs rules and boundaries. This paper reviews the broader institutional design problem regarding the effectiveness of the central bank in practice and confirms the need for rules and boundaries. The framework proposed for improving the Fed incorporates key elements that have already been adopted in the European Union. The case of ELA provision by the ECB and the Central Bank of Cyprus to Marfin-Laiki Bank during the crisis, however, suggests that the existence of rules and boundaries may not be enough to limit harmful discretion. During a crisis, novel interpretations of the legal authority of the central bank may be introduced to create a grey area that might be exploited to justify harmful discretionary decisions even in the presence of rules and boundaries. This raises the question how to ensure that rules and boundaries are respected in practice.     

Contained crisis and socialized risk: Unconventional monetary policy by the Bank of Japan in the 1890s

In the 1880s, Japan experienced its first stock investment boom, which was highly leveraged by the banking sector. In 1890, its first financial crisis occurred and triggered a de-leveraging process. With a high lower bound of the conventional interest rate intervention under the fixed exchange rate regime, the Bank of Japan decided to implement a massive securities purchases first time among major industrial economies and continued this unconventional policy until the early 1900s. We examine how the unconventional intervention for a decade affected the stock prices and the trade volumes, and show that the upward distortion in market pricing was considerable and that the equity-risk premium accordingly dropped, which meant socialization of the risk associated with the industrial investment.     

大型银行、中小企业与贸易融资:青岛案例

长期以来,商业银行尤其是大银行拓展中小企业信贷市场一直面临困境。但中国工商银行青岛分行却以中小企业商品交易为基础,较为成功地开发了一系列贸易融资产品。由此可以看出,在特定的产品、制度和技术保证下,大银行也可以成为中小企业信贷市场上的有效资金供给者。     

我国银行理财业务发展趋势研究

对国内商业银行理财业务的发展状况进行了简要概述， 进而对理财业务开展过程中的一些问题进行了分析， 强调指出市场化应该成为银行理财业务转型升级和创新发展的方向， 并提出了实现市场化发展方向的若干具体措施。     

FX Intervention in the New Keynesian Model

We develop an open-economy New Keynesian Model with foreign exchange (FX) intervention in the presence of a financial accelerator and shocks to risk appetite in international capital markets. We obtain closed-form solutions for optimal monetary and FX intervention policies assuming the central bank cannot commit to future policies, and we compare the solution to that under policy commitment. We show how FX intervention can help reduce the volatility of the exchange rate, of inflation, and of the output gap, thus mitigating welfare losses associated with shocks in the international capital markets. We also show that, when the financial accelerator is strong, there is a risk of indeterminacy (self-fulfilling currency and inflation movements) although FX intervention can reduce this risk and thus reinforce the credibility of the inflation targeting regime. Model simulations match well the impact of a VIX shock obtained by local projections on a panel of inflation targeting emerging markets.     

金融压力、所有制结构与银行风险承担——基于中国影子银行活动的实证研究*

2008年金融危机之后，监测与防范系统性金融风险、维护金融稳定成为各国监管机构的工作重点。本文构建了一个反映我国系统性金融风险的中国金融压力指数（FSIC）。基于此，本文研究不同所有制结构的商业银行将如何调整影子银行业务以应对系统性金融风险。实证结果表明，当金融压力上升时，相较于国有银行，非国有银行的风险承担水平显著上升。进一步研究发现，这一差异与两类银行对影子银行这一风险业务的调整有关。当金融压力上升时，国有银行会显著减少影子银行业务，而非国有银行的影子银行业务不会减少。本文提出了国有银行的双重职能这一观点来解释实证研究的发现。本文的研究结论对于指导我国金融市场化改革和防范系统性金融风险具有重要启示。     

Too-Big-To-Fail: Why Megabanks Have Not Become Smaller Since the Global Financial Crisis?

ABSTRACT

More than ten years after the global financial crisis, what has happened to the ‘too-big-to-fail’ (TBTF) banks whose reckless behavior was among its preconditions, but which received public support and guarantees in the midst of that crisis? Insofar as this too-big-to-fail status helped create the crisis and then imposed costs on the rest of society, we would expect these banks to have shrunk. We investigate the evolution of 31 global-TBTF banks and find that their overall size has hardly recorded any substantial change. However, there is no sense of urgency in the flourishing post-crisis literature on TBTF banks about the need to contain their size; the prevalent view therein is that if properly regulated, the risks that arise from a financial system dominated by TBTF banks are manageable. This view rests on the same overly narrow theoretical underpinnings whose flaws were exposed in the crisis. We argue that too-big-to-fail banking is embedded in a set of self-reinforcing policies—consolidation, balance-sheet support through quantitative easing, favorable regulations, bank lobbying, and geo-economic and geo-political considerations—which explain why these banks have not shrunk and why they remain a threat to financial stability, well after the lessons of the crisis should have been learned.     

宏观审慎政策、经济周期与银行风险承担*

本文基于中国227家商业银行2005－2016年非平衡面板数据，实证检验中国宏观审慎政策实施对于银行风险承担的影响。结果表明：宏观审慎政策增强会在一定程度上抑制银行风险承担，而且这种显著的负向关系并不随着银行风险代理变量、经营辐射范围以及是否有外资入股等条件的改变而发生变化。经济周期会对宏观审慎政策的有效性产生非对称性影响，即相比在经济上行时期，在经济下行时期的宏观审慎政策对银行风险承担的抑制作用更强且更为显著。就可能的影响机制而言，本文发现宏观审慎政策通过提高银行盈利能力，从而降低银行风险承担。       

双选信道下一种基于混沌交织的FBMC系统

高速移动环境下，无线信道具有时频双选性衰落的特性，使得滤波器组多载波(Filter Bank Multi-carrier，FBMC)系统产生长突发差错。将一种基于Baker映射的混沌交织算法应用在滤波器组多载波系统中，根据混沌密钥对发送数据进行分块和重新排列，按照Baker映射规则完成数据交织。此方法可以将长突发差错变为单突发差错，结合卷积编码能有效地纠正双选信道产生的长突发差错。仿真结果表明，在双选择信道中，基于混沌交织的滤波器组多载波系统误比特率性能优于传统基于块交织的滤波器组多载波系统。     

NOMINAL GDP TARGETING AND CENTRAL BANK CONSERVATIVENESS

In the literature on monetary economics, there is the ‘inflationary bias’ result which predicts that the rate of inflation will be biased towards a higher level under discretionary monetary policy than under a rule‐based policy regime. It is established that a credible nominal target can eliminate this ‘inflationary bias’. In this paper, we examine the case of nominal GDP targeting, which is a rule‐based monetary regime. Depending on the degree of conservativeness by the central bank, we show in a stylized model the choice of different combination of inflation and real GDP targets can still result in an ‘inflationary bias’, and there also exists the possibility of a ‘dis‐inflationary bias’.