Christopher Hackworth, Nicola Shadbolt and David Seaward.
While official housing market statistics are relatively timely and high frequency, they usually come with a lag of at least one month. So indicators that lead official estimates are helpful for identifying turning points, or any ‘shocks’ to the economy.
Continue reading “Bitesize: Understanding housing activity in real time”
Jonathan Fullwood.
Sometimes the obvious questions are the hardest to answer. In this post I ask how much of what the Bank and the financial industry in general write can actually be read by a broad audience. Based on my findings, I suggest that both must try harder if claims of accessibility are to be meaningful.
Continue reading “A cat, a hat and a simple measure of gobbledygook: How readable is your writing?”
Arzu Uluc and Tomasz Wieladek.
Following the global financial crisis of 2007-08, financial reform introduced time-varying capital requirements to raise the resilience of the financial system. But do we really understand how this policy works and the impact it is likely to have on UK banks’ largest activity, mortgage lending? In a recent paper we investigated the UK experience of time-varying microprudential capital requirements before the financial crisis. We found that an increase in this requirement intended to make a bank more resilient actually induced it to shift into riskier mortgage lending.
Continue reading “Unintended consequences of higher capital requirements”
Francesc R. Tous, Puriya Abbassi, Rajkamal Iyer, José-Luis Peydró.
What are the consequences of proprietary trading? Banks typically hold and trade a significant amount of securities, and during the financial crisis, many of these securities suffered strong price declines. How did banks react? This is precisely what we investigate for the case of Germany in a recently published paper. We find that some banks increased their investments in securities, especially for those securities that suffered price drops. This strategy delivered high returns; but at the same time, these banks pulled back on lending to the real economy, since during the financial crisis they could not easily raise new (long-term) funding. Our findings suggest that proprietary trading during a crisis can lead to less lending to the real sector.
Continue reading “Proprietary trading: evidence from the crisis”
Paolo Siciliani, Nic Garbarino, Thomas Papavranoussis and Jonathan Stalmann.
Systemically important banks are material providers of critical economic functions. The Global Financial Crisis showed how distress or failure of one of these firms may have a severe impact on the financial system and the real economy. Systemic capital surcharges protect the economy from these negative spillovers by decreasing systemically important firms’ probability of distress or failure. A graduated approach facilitates effective competition to the extent that the capital surcharges faced by firms are more proportionate to the scale of systemic risks that they pose. This post illustrates some of the competition implications with respect to the methodology used to set the number and level of thresholds.
Andrew Hewitt.
Deposit insurance schemes guard against bank runs by reducing or removing individual depositors’ incentives to withdraw their funds if they believe their bank to be in trouble. They help protect depositors but they risk also protecting risky bank business models by removing depositors’ incentives to avoid riskier banks. What can be done about this? In the past the answer was sometimes to make small depositors bear part of the risk through “co-insurance”. This was proven not to be credible. In this blog I consider some of the options available, including the risk-based levies currently being introduced in the EU and elsewhere, and increased transparency, drawing on recent literature on the saliency of tax in consumer choices.
Continue reading “Should the true costs of insuring deposits of up to £75,000 be made clearer?”
Robert Hills, John Hooley, Yevgeniya Korniyenko and Tomasz Wieladek.
When funding conditions became much more difficult in the recent financial crisis, how did UK banks react? Did they adjust their domestic and external lending to different degrees? Did foreign-owned banks behave differently from UK-owned banks, and did it make a difference whether they were a branch or a subsidiary? Did the other features of their balance sheet make a material difference to their lending behaviour? Our research suggests that the answer to all of these questions is “yes”.
Continue reading “Transmitting liquidity shocks across borders: evidence from UK banks”
Marilyne Tolle.
Central banks (CBs) have long issued paper currency. The development of Bitcoin and other private digital currencies has provided them with the technological means to issue their own digital currency. But should they?
Addressing this question is part of the Bank’s Research Agenda. In this post I sketch out how a CB digital currency – call it CBcoin – might affect the monetary and banking systems – setting aside other important and complex systemic implications that range from prudential regulation and financial stability to technology, operational and financial conduct.
I argue that taken to its most extreme conclusion, CBcoin issuance could have far-reaching consequences for commercial and central banking – divorcing payments from private bank deposits and even putting an end to banks’ ability to create money. By redefining the architecture of payment systems, CBcoin could thus challenge fractional reserve banking and reshape the conduct of monetary policy.
Continue reading “Central bank digital currency: the end of monetary policy as we know it?”
Saleem Bahaj, Iren Levina and Jumana Saleheen.
Since the financial crisis the UK has experienced a period of weak productivity growth, weak investment coupled with a decline in credit to non-financial sectors of the economy. But there is debate about the direction of causality: did low growth and other structural factors mean firms and households wanted to borrow less – as argued by Martin Wolf? Or did the financial sector offer too few funds to the real economy in the wake of the crisis as banks tried to repair their balance sheets. Alternatively, the financial system may not be functioning properly in general, if much of the financial sector’s activity contributes little to the betterment of lives and efficiency of business – a point made by John Kay.
John Lewis.
Today Bank Underground celebrates its first birthday! We took our first steps into the blogosphere at 8:24am on Friday 19 June 2015. In our first year, we’ve published almost 100 posts and recorded over 400,000 views. So which posts have been most popular with our readers?
Continue reading “Bank Underground is a year old!”