Tracking foreign capital

Christiane Kneer and Alexander Raabe

Capital flows are fickle. In the UK, the largest and most volatile component of inflows from foreign investors are so-called ‘other investment flows’ – the foreign capital which flows into banks and other financial institutions. But where do these funds ultimately go and which sectors are particularly exposed to fickle capital inflows? Do capital inflows allow domestic firms to borrow more? Or does capital from abroad ultimately finance mortgages of UK households? Some of the foreign capital could also get passed on to the financial sector or flow back abroad.

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Bitesize: How much did PPI subsidise personal loan rates pre-crisis?

David Seaward

The Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) mis-selling scandal has rumbled on for years. But how did PPI impact loan margins pre-crisis?

This post argues that income from cross-selling PPI substantially offset lenders’ margins on personal loans between 2004 and 2009, and compares the pre-crisis PPI-adjusted margin to loan spreads today.

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CCP porting, are there lessons to be learnt from elsewhere?

Fernando V. Cerezetti and Gerardo Ferrara

Post-crisis regulatory reforms have reshaped and increased the amount of clearing activity in the OTC derivatives market. An emerging issue is so-called “client porting” – i.e. how central counterparties (CCPs) can transfer positions from one clearing member (CM) to another in the aftermath of one member defaulting. In this post, we discuss possible ways to offer clients temporary access to clearing services following a CM default, which we believe could increase the likelihood of successfully porting clients and avoiding further pressure on prices and market stability.

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What happens when ‘angels fall’?

Yuliya Baranova, Harry Goodacre and Jamie Semark.

Over the past 20 years, the share of outstanding corporate bonds rated BBB, the lowest investment-grade rating, has more than doubled. This has left a large volume of securities on the edge of a cliff, from which they could drop to a high-yield rating and become so-called ‘fallen angels’. Some investors may be forced to sell ‘fallen angels’, for example if their mandate prevents them from holding high-yield bonds. And this selling pressure could push bond prices down, beyond levels consistent with the downgrade news. In this post we explore the impact that sales of ‘fallen angels’ could have on market functioning, finding that they could test the liquidity of the sterling high-yield corporate bond market.

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Have FSRs got news for you?

Rhiannon Sowerbutts, Vesko Karadotchev, Richard Harris and Evarist Stoja

While communication has been recognised as an important aspect of monetary policy for over three decades and received an enormous amount of attention in the academic literature, there has been almost no attention paid to the importance and effects of financial stability communication. In a new working paper we examine financial markets’ reaction to the Financial Stability Report.

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The Great War and the Bank of England as Market Maker of Last Resort

Mike Anson, David Bholat, Mark Billings, Miao Kang and Ryland Thomas

During the global financial crisis, some central banks acted as market makers of last resort, buying and selling securities in financial markets when trading in them had stalled. Some commentators claimed this role was “a completely new” one for central banks. In this blog, we show, on the contrary, that the Bank of England acting as a ‘market maker of last resort’ has precedent. Using newly transcribed micro-level data which we are publishing today, we detail how officials intervened in the 1914 financial crisis in a way that has at least a passing resemblance to the actions the Bank took during the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007-09.

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Give me more! Higher Capital Requirements and Loan Collateralisation

Sudipto Karmakar

How do banks adjust when faced with a sudden rise in capital requirements? The most frequent response, in the theoretical literature, is that they reduce lending or “deleverage” (see, e.g., Aiyagari and Gertler (1999); Gertler and Kiyotaki (2010). This is particularly true in crisis episodes when raising equity can be costly. However, in a new paper co-authored with Hans Degryse and Artashes Karapetyan, I show this is only part of the story. Banks may also ask borrowers to provide more collateral; collateralised exposures carry lower risk weights on average and hence enhance capital ratios. This requirement can adversely affect young and new borrowers that typically lack collateral to pledge and are also unlikely to have longstanding banking relationships.

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Bitesize: Trading activity during the Corporate Bond Purchase Scheme

David Mallaburn, Matt Roberts-Sklar and Laura Silvestri.

The Bank of England’s August 2016 monetary policy package included the £10bn ‘Corporate Bond Purchase Scheme’ (CBPS). But who did the BoE buy those bonds from?

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Look abroad! Global financial conditions and risks to domestic growth

Fernando Eguren-Martin and Andrej Sokol

What’s the relationship between financial conditions and risks to growth in an economy? And, in a world of highly integrated financial markets, to what extent are these “local” risks rather than reflections of global developments? In this post we offer some tentative answers. Financial conditions, measured across a broad range of asset classes and countries, display an important common component reflecting global developments. Loose financial conditions today increase the likelihood of a growth boom over the following few quarters, but when global financial conditions are loose, they increase the chances of a sharp contraction further ahead, highlighting some of the challenges of managing risks to growth across time from a policy maker’s perspective.

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Does competition help or hinder bank stability in the UK?

Sebastian de-Ramon, Bill Francis and Michael Straughan.

There is a debate in the regulatory and academic community about whether competition is good or bad for bank stability, particularly following the financial crisis (see Chapter 6 of the Independent Commission on Banking final report). The debate tends to be seen as a head-to-head argument between two camps: those that see competition as bad for stability (competition-fragility) versus those that see competition as good (competition-stability). In new research, we look at how competition affects the stability of banks in the UK. We find that competition affects less stable firms differently than more stable firms and that focussing on what happens to the average firm may not be sufficient.

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