The Real Effects of Zombie Lending in Europe

Belinda Tracey

‘Zombie lending’ occurs when a lender supports an otherwise insolvent borrower through forbearance measures such as repayment holidays and temporary interest-only loans. The phrase was first coined for Japan in the late 1990s, but more recently several authors have documented that zombie lending to European firms has been widespread following the sovereign debt crisis (see Acharya et al (2019), Adalet McGowan et al (2018), Banerjee and Hofmann (2020), Blattner et al (2018) and Schivardi et al (2017)). In a recent paper, I examine whether these lending practices contributed to the subsequent low output experienced by the euro area. My findings suggest that zombie lending had negative consequences for output, investment and productivity in the euro area over the period 2011 to 2014.

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Quantifying culture and its implications for bank riskiness

Joel Suss, David Bholat, Alex Gillespie and Tom Reader

‘Bad cultures’ at banks are often blamed for scandals and crises, from the global financial crisis to the mis-selling of payment protection insurance (PPI) in the UK. Yet surprisingly little research has tested this claim. This is because quantifying culture is difficult to do. Our working paper gives it a go. Leveraging unique access to data available to regulators, we diagnose the cultural health of the UK banking sector. We find that banks with organisational cultures two standard deviations below the sector average are associated with a 50% increased risk of failure.

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Decomposing changes in the functioning of the sterling repo market from 2014 to 2018

Rupal Patel

Repo markets form part of the plumbing of the financial system. They allow participants to borrow cash against collateral and buy back this collateral at a higher price at the end of the transaction. When there is a blockage in repo it has repercussions on financial markets. Since 2014 there have been significant changes in repo functioning, causing policymakers to question why these changes are happening and what it means for financial stability. Our paper addresses these questions. We find fluctuations in repo were driven by changes in dealers’ supply in the pre-Covid period 2014–18. We subsequently consider the possible role that the introduction of the leverage ratio played in the willingness of intermediaries to respond to demands for cash.

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What is the relationship between a markets-based measure of leverage and banks’ funding costs?

Kieran Dent, Sinem Hacioglu Hoke and Apostolos Panagiotopoulos

The Great Financial Crisis demonstrated an important feedback loop between banks’ capitalisation and funding costs. As banks’ capitalisation declined, banks’ wholesale creditors responded by demanding higher interest rates to lend to them. In turn, higher funding costs dented banks’ profitability, further weakening their capitalisation. Quantifying the relationship between funding costs and market-based measures of leverage – a proxy for bank solvency – is key to understand how banks might fare in a future stress situation – for instance as part of regulatory stress tests.

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Covid-19 briefing: pandemics, natural disasters and banks’ balance sheets

Neeltje van Horen

The Covid-19 (Covid) pandemic is a major shock to the economy but unlike traditional crises or credit crunches, its origin is exogenous to the financial sector. The economy’s ability to recover from the impact of the pandemic will however depend in part on the availability of credit. This raises the question how banks absorb a large shock which originates from outside the financial sector. To answer this question this post reviews the literature on how previous pandemics and natural disasters in the developed world affected banks’ balance sheets. One key message stands out: banks that are more rooted in their market are much more likely to continue lending when faced with the economic fallout from such shock.

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Capital flights during Covid-19

Fernando Eguren-Martin, Cian O’Neill, Andrej Sokol and Lukas von dem Berge

While planes were grounded, capital flew out of emerging market economies in response to the acceleration in the spread of the virus in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. Was this capital flight predictable once you account for the sudden deterioration in the global financial environment? In this post we present a model that helps to think about how financial conditions and international capital flows are linked. We then apply this methodology to events observed between March and May 2020, and find that the model predicted a large increase in the likelihood of capital flight. However, the scale of outflows was abnormally large even once the sharp tightening in financial conditions is accounted for.

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Separating deposit-taking from investment banking: new evidence on an old question

Matthieu Chavaz and David Elliott

On 16 June 1933, as the nationwide banking crisis was reaching a new peak, freshly elected US President Franklin D. Roosevelt put his signature at the bottom of a 37-page document: the Glass-Steagall Act. Eight decades later, the debate still rages on: should retail and investment banking be separated, as Glass-Steagall required? In a recent paper, we shed new light on the consequences of this type of regulation by examining the recent UK ‘ring-fencing’ legislation. We show that ring-fencing has an important impact on banking groups’ funding structures, and find that this incentivises banks to rebalance their activities towards retail mortgage lending and away from capital markets, with important knock-on effects for competition and risk-taking across the wider banking system.

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Hubble? Bubble? Valuation trouble?

Can Gao, Ian Martin, Arjun Mahalingam and Nicholas Vause

Since Covid-19-related crashes in March, major stock indices around the world have bounced back. This is despite little or no recovery in corporate earnings expectations. As a result, forward-looking price-to-earnings ratios have increased, rising above long-run average values in most large advanced economies and approaching record highs in the United States. Commenting on such valuations, some market participants have suggested there is ‘a great deal of optimism priced into the market’ and that stock prices ‘cannot defy economic gravity indefinitely’. This post takes a closer look at stock valuations, focusing on the UK, and drawing both on a textbook model and new research from academia.

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Left feeling unsettled: what are settlement failures, how prevalent are they, and what do we do about them?

Gary Harper, Pedro Gurrola-Perez and Jieshuang He

What is a settlement fail?

Imagine you’ve booked tickets for a flight, and go to pick them up and pay for them on the day. You arrive at the airport but find out the airline has overbooked, and already given your ticket away. Worse yet, because you’ve missed this flight you’re going to miss an onward connection. But, you’ll likely get a replacement ticket in a day or two as compensation.

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The leverage ratio: a balance between risk and safety

Jonathan Smith

What was the root cause of the financial crisis? Ask any economist or banker and undoubtedly they will at some point mention leverage (see e.g. here, here and here). Yet when a capital requirement based on leverage — the leverage ratio requirement — was introduced, fierce criticism followed (see e.g. here and here). Drawing on the insights from a working paper, and thinking about the main criticism — that a leverage ratio requirement could cause excessive risk-taking — this seems not to have been the case.

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