Financial fragility,sovereign default risk and the limits to commercial bank bail-outs

We show that with intertwined weak banks and weak sovereigns, bank recapitalizations become much less effective. We construct a DSGE model with leverage constrained banks lending to firms and holding domestic government bonds. Bond prices reflect endogenously generated sovereign risk. This introduces a negative amplification cycle: after a credit crisis output losses increase more because higher interest rates trigger lower bond prices and subsequent losses at banks. This further tightens bank leverage constraints, and causes interest rates to rise further. Also bank recapitalizations are then much less effective. Recaps involve swaps of newly issued sovereign bonds for bank equity, the new debt increases sovereign debt discounts, leading to capital losses for the banks on their holdings of sovereign debt that (partially) offset the impact of the recapitalization. The favorable macroeconomic effects of bank recaps on the recovery after a financial crisis are correspondingly lower.     

Bond finance,bank credit,and aggregate fluctuations in an open economy

Corporate sectors in emerging markets have noticeably increased their reliance on foreign financing, presumably reflecting low global interest rates. The evidence also shows a rebalancing from bank loans towards bonds. To study these developments, we develop a dynamic open economy model where these modes of finance are determined endogenously. The model replicates the stylized facts following a drop in world interest rates; in particular, rebalancing towards bonds occurs because bank credit becomes relatively more expensive, reflecting the scarcity of bank equity. More generally, the model is suitable for studying interactions between modes of finance and the macroeconomy.     

The Relationship Between Sovereign Spreads and International Reserves: Does the Exchange Rate Regime Matter?

International reserves have been put forward as an important factor affecting sovereign spreads in the literature. This article empirically analyzes whether the relationship between international reserves and sovereign spreads depends on exchange rate policy in emerging markets. The analysis is carried out using exchange rate classifications based on both the officially declared regimes and the actual exchange rate behavior. The results show that international reserves reduce sovereign spreads for all levels of exchange rate flexibility using both classifications. Reserves have a similar effect on spreads for all exchange rate categories, except for hard pegs, under which the effect is larger.     

Institutional failure or market failure?

We investigate the effect of the power of creditors, property rights protection, and institutional quality, on bank profits using a panel of 498 banks from 46 countries. Results show that better institutions and stronger property rights protection reduce bank profits, while stronger power of creditors drives up bank profits significantly. Results imply that better institutions and enhanced property rights protection lead to greater flow of credit allowing firms and investors to undertake more profitable ventures. By extension, stronger creditor rights erect steeper barriers to external finance for firms and investors. National indicators of economic freedoms may be more important to lowering the spread than strict creditor rights. Seemingly, credit markets fail when economic institutions fail or when governments intervene into these markets in ways that impede the safety and soundness of financial transactions and private contracting.     

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN CONSUMER CREDIT AND DEFAULT LITERATURE

This survey discusses recent contributions to the quantitative literature on unsecured consumer debt and default, and some ongoing challenges for the literature. Key topics include the sources of the rise in personal bankruptcies, the importance of asymmetric information and the effects of developments in information technologies on consumer credit markets, delinquency and informal bankruptcy, debt collection and restructuring of distressed debt, the cyclical behavior of consumer debt and default, and the insurance role of household debt. Implications for welfare analysis and policy design are discussed. Several theoretical contributions and approaches to modeling the consumer credit markets are also highlighted.     

ADMISSIBILITY OF GENERIC MARKET MODELS OF FORWARD SWAP RATES

Our main goal is to re‐examine and extend certain results from the papers by Galluccio et al. and Pietersz and van Regenmortel. We establish several results providing alternate necessary and sufficient conditions for admissibility of a family of forward swaps, that is, the property that it is supported by a (positive) family of bonds associated with the underlying tenor structure. We also derive the generic expression for the joint dynamics of a family of forward swap rates under a single probability measure and we show that these dynamics are uniquely determined by a selection of volatility processes with respect to the set of driving martingales.     

小微机构以互联网方式接入金融信用信息基础数据库问题探讨——以吉林省为例

为支持小微机构健康、快速发展,中国人民银行长春中心支行按照省级平台一口接入的模式,积极组织小微机构有序开展接入金融信用信息基础数据库工作,但由于小微机构认识程度不够、业务管理不规范、接入费用高等因素,严重影响了接入进度。近期中国人民银行征信中心推出了互联网接入方式,并进行试点运行。以吉林省为例,分析接入模式转换时需要解决的问题,并提出相关政策建议。     

A division of the capitalist class and the market for money capital

In a one‐commodity economy populated by capitalists equipped with equal endowment but with heterogeneous linear production technology, a division of the capitalist class emerges endogenously. The capitalists with relatively weak technology, yielding the profit rate lower than the interest rate, become a money capitalist (lender), whereas the capitalists with relatively strong technology, yielding the profit rate greater than the interest rate, become an industrial capitalist (borrower). The equilibrium interest rate is derived by the associated demand and supply relation. From this setup of the model follow two essential relationships Marx establishes between the average profit rate and the interest rate: (a) that the profit (rate) sets a maximum limit of interest (rate), and (b) that the two rates are correlated in the long‐run. Lastly, the profit rate of financial sector is less than that of industrial sector due to the basic setup of the model where the industrial sector uses leverage to amplify the underlying capital profit rate, whereas the financial sector lacks intermediation technology, which would have enabled it to borrow profitably.     

On the role of Islamic and conventional banks in the monetary policy transmission in Malaysia: Do size and liquidity matter?

This paper empirically investigates the impact of monetary policy on the credit supply of Islamic versus conventional banks of Malaysia using an unbalanced panel dataset over the period 2005-2016. While estimating the effects of three alternative measures of monetary policy on banks' credit supply, we include several bank-specific and macroeconomic variables in the specification as control variables. We provide strong evidence on the existence of the credit channel of monetary policy transmission mechanism in Malaysia. Yet, we show that Islamic banks respond considerably less to changes in monetary policy instruments as compared to their conventional counterparts. We also find that the monetary policy measures affect small-sized banks and less-liquid banks more as compared to large-sized and more-liquid banks. Our findings suggest that for an effective monetary policy, there is a vital need to consider the nature of Islamic banking while devising any monetary policy instruments to manage credit supply in the economy.     

News sentiment and sovereign credit risk

We explore the impact of media content on sovereign credit risk. Our measure of media tone is extracted from the Thomson Reuters News Analytics database. As a proxy for sovereign credit risk we consider credit default swap (CDS) spreads, which are decomposed into their risk premium and default risk components. We find that media tone explains and predicts CDS returns and is a mixture of noise and information. Its effect on risk premium induces a temporary change in investors’ appetite for credit risk exposure, whereas its impact on the default component leads to reassessments of the fundamentals of sovereign economies.