Category: Financial Stability

Supervisory governance, capture and non-performing loans

Nicolò Fraccaroli

Recent reforms that followed the Great Financial Crisis, as the establishment of the Single Supervisory Mechanism in Europe and the Prudential Regulatory Authority in the UK, reflect the belief that the governance of banking supervision affects financial stability. However, while existing research identifies the pros and cons of having either a central bank or a separate agency responsible for microprudential banking supervision, the advantages of having this task shared by both institutions (shared supervision) have received considerably less attention.

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With a little help from my friends: counter-cyclical capital buffers during the Covid-19 crisis

Dennis Reinhardt and Carlos van Hombeeck

Have post-crisis reforms of banking regulation made banks and lending more resilient to the shock from Covid-19 and if so by how much? This blog takes one specific example – countercyclical capital buffers (CCyBs) – and shows that policy makers in a range of countries were able to quickly release these capital requirements, enabling banks to use the cumulated buffers. This released capital may in turn potentially help banks to support lending. And it will likely benefit lending in the country releasing requirements on buffers as well as banks’ lending to other countries, leading to potential positive international spillovers (see e.g. discussion of spillovers due to macroprudential policies by the ECB and others).

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Global financial cycles since 1880

Galina Potjagailo and Maik H. Wolters

Global financial cycles: a long-term affair

Today’s financial system is global: credit and several financial asset classes show booms and busts across countries, sometimes with severe repercussions to the global economy. Yet it is debated to what extent common dynamics rather than domestic cycles lie behind financial fluctuations and whether the impact of global drivers is growing. In a recent Staff Working Paper, we observe various global financial cycles going as far back as the 19th century. We find that a volatile global equity price cycle is nowadays the main driver of stock prices across advanced economies. Global cycles in credit and house prices have become larger and longer over the last 30 years, having gained relevance in economies that are more financially open and developed.

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The macro consequences of dollar shortages and central bank swap lines during the Covid-19 pandemic

Fernando Eguren Martin

Dollar shortages in funding markets outside the United States have been a recurrent feature of the last three major crises, including the turmoil associated with the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. The Federal Reserve has responded by improving conditions and extending the reach of its network of central bank swap lines, with the aim of channelling US dollars to non-US financial systems. Despite the recurrence of this phenomena, little is known about the macroeconomic consequences of both dollar shortage shocks and central bank swap lines. In this post (and in an underlying Staff Working Paper) I provide some tentative answers. 

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Playing with fire: banks’ distressed sales under solvency and liquidity constraints

Caterina Lepore and Jamie Coen

Many commentators on the global financial crisis identified ‘fire sales’ as one of the key mechanisms by which shocks to banks were amplified and transmitted across the wider financial system. When firms in distress sell assets held by other institutions at discounted prices, losses can spread through the financial system as prices fall, amplifying the initial stress. In a working paper published last year, we explored this mechanism by presenting a new model of fire sales. In doing so, we answer the following questions: Which types of financial shocks combine to produce fire sales? How can banks optimally liquidate their portfolios when forced to do so? How big a risk are bank fire sales?

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Why fragmentation of the global data supply chain poses risks to financial services

Matthew Osborne and David Bholat

Every minute of the day, Google returns over 3.5 million searches, Instagram users post nearly 50,000 photos, and Tinder matches about 7,000 times. We all produce and consume data, and financial firms are key contributors to this trend. Indeed, the global business models of many firms have amplified the data-intensity of the financial services industry. But potential fragmentation of the global data supply chain now poses a novel risk to financial services. In this blog post, we first discuss the importance of data flows for financial services, and then potential risks from blockages to these flows.

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Special series: Covid-19 Briefings

Belinda Tracey

Starting today, Bank Underground (BU) is launching a special series of ‘Covid-19 Briefings’. These posts are different to our regular posts – rather than containing primary analysis or the author’s own research, they instead aim to summarise key lessons from the early literature on a particular area of the economics of Covid-19. Each post focuses on a different area, and aims to provide an introduction to key papers, rather than a comprehensive overview of all the literature. As with any BU post, they are the views of the authors, not necessarily those of the Bank. We hope our readers find them helpful in understanding the new, rapidly developing and fast growing body of work on the economics of Covid-19.

Belinda Tracey, Managing Editor

If you want to get in touch, please email us at bankunderground@bankofengland.co.uk or leave a comment below.

Comments will only appear once approved by a moderator, and are only published where a full name is supplied. Bank Underground is a blog for Bank of England staff to share views that challenge – or support – prevailing policy orthodoxies. The views expressed here are those of the authors, and are not necessarily those of the Bank of England, or its policy committees.

There’s more to house prices than interest rates

Lisa Panigrahi and Danny Walker

The average house in the UK is worth ten times what it was in 1980. Consumer prices are only three times higher. So house prices have more than trebled in real terms in just over a generation. In the 100 years leading up to 1980 they only doubled. Recent commentary on this blog and elsewhere argues that this unprecedented rise in house prices can be explained by one factor: lower interest rates. But this simple explanation might be too simple. In this blog post – which analyses the data available before Covid-19 hit the UK – we show that the interest rates story doesn’t seem to fit all of the facts. Other factors such as credit conditions or supply constraints could be important too.

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All you need is cash

Andreas Joseph, Christiane Kneer, Neeltje van Horen and Jumana Saleheen

Financial crises affect firm growth not only in the short-run, but even more so in the long-run. Some firms permanently gain while others lose and cash is a crucial asset to have when the credit cycle turns. As we show in a new Staff Working Paper, having cash at hand allows firms to continue to invest during the crisis while industry rivals without cash have to divest. This gives cash-rich firms an important competitive edge that not only benefits them during the crisis but that gives them an advantage that lasts way beyond the crisis years.

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