Trapped in a web of debt? Inefficiencies from corporate debt and the potential case for macroprudential intervention

Emily Clayton and Martina Fazio

Debt creates threads between the financial system and the real economy. These threads transmit shocks across a web of connections, meaning that financial shocks may pose risks to households and businesses, and real-economy shocks may jeopardise financial stability. These threads can also become entangled into knots – sources of inefficiency. Macroprudential regulators in the UK have already intervened partially to disentangle the inefficiency from consumption cuts by over-indebted households. In the next decade, policymakers could consider whether a similar intervention is needed to limit corporate debt. In this post, we map the threads that corporate debt creates, identifying areas where entanglement may have created inefficiencies, and considering the potential case for borrower-based tools to unravel them.

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Measuring capital at risk in the UK banking sector

Giovanni Covi, James Brookes and Charumathi Raja

How banks are exposed to the financial system and real-economy determines concentration risk and interconnectedness in the banking sector, and in turn, the severity of tail-events. We construct the Global Network data set, a comprehensive exposure-based data set of the UK banking sector, updated quarterly, covering roughly 90% of total assets. We use it to study the UK banking system’s microstructure and estimate the likelihood and severity of tail-events. We find that during the Covid-19 (Covid) pandemic, the likelihood and severity of tail-events in the UK banking sector increased. The probability of an extreme stress event with losses above £91 billion (roughly 19% of CET1 capital) increased from 1% before the pandemic to 4.1% in 2020 Q2, subsequently falling to 1.7% in 2021 Q4.

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Back to the Future IV: challenges for financial stability policy in the next decade

Alina Barnett, Sinem Hacioglu Hoke and Simon Lloyd

Since 2007, macroprudential policymakers have grappled with a broad set of vulnerabilities. While regulators cannot be sure what risks the next decade will feature, they can be sure that the set of issues will continuously evolve. In this post, we explore three timely challenges that financial stability policymakers are likely to face in the coming years, including risks associated with: non-bank financial intermediation, cryptoassets and decentralised finance (DeFi), and climate change. These challenges have been noted by many, and are already stimulating development of macroprudential frameworks. But while some of this development can build on well-grounded principles for financial stability policy, other aspects are likely to come up against three timeless challenges, requiring novel and innovative thinking to overcome.

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The Basel regulatory framework: evolution of its textual complexity

James Brookes, Matthew Everitt and Quynh-Anh Vo

The Basel III framework put in place in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis 2007–08 consists of a range of regulatory standards, each addressing a specific source of financial instability. Its implementation has however led to active discussion about whether the complexity of financial regulations has materially increased. This blog post presents insights from an analysis on the evolution of textual complexity of the Basel framework.

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Sizing UK banking sector’s exposures to climate policy relevant sectors

Giovanni Covi, James Brookes and Charumathi Raja

Climate transition will undoubtedly expose UK banks to new risks and opportunities. Hence, we quantify the UK banking sector’s share of total assets allocated towards climate policy relevant sectors (CPRS). Using The Global Network data set mapping the network of UK banks’ loan and security exposures, we find that the UK banking system’s direct CPRS exposures amount up to 6.1% of total assets, or 45.7% of non-financial corporate (NFC) exposures. When considering also indirect CPRS exposures towards other financial corporates, the share of total assets subject to CPRS classification increases up to 10%. While 83% of these assets are tied up in carbon-intensive sectors, 17% will likely benefit from climate transition plans. We do not measure exposures subject to climate-related physical risks.

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Shifting the composition of start-up cohorts can boost macroeconomic performance

Ralph de Haas, Vincent Sterk and Neeltje van Horen

Anaemic productivity growth and limited business dynamism remain key policy concerns in Europe and the US. Policies to improve macroeconomic performance often target existing firms. Examples include tax measures to stimulate firm-level Research & Development and structural reforms to eliminate distortions in labour, financial, and product markets. In a new paper we investigate an entirely different policy lever, one that has so far remained largely unexplored: influencing the types of firms that are being started in the first place. Using a comprehensive new data set on European start-ups, we show how tax policies that shift the composition of new start-up cohorts could deliver meaningful macroeconomic gains.

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Cryptoassets, the metaverse and systemic risk

Owen Lock and Teresa Cascino

Cryptoassets could have important roles within the metaverse – a decentralised, immersive next generation of the internet. Cryptoassets enable verifiable ownership of digital items, and when built to common standards, can move interoperably between web applications – increasing the asset’s value proposition. They can also align the incentives of developers, content creators, users and investors on metaverse platforms, and are required to incentivise miners and validators to add metaverse-based transactions to the underlying blockchain. We argue that if an open and decentralised metaverse grows, existing risks from cryptoassets may scale to have systemic financial stability consequences. Widespread adoption of crypto in the metaverse, or any other setting would require compliance with robust consumer protection and financial stability regulatory frameworks.

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Rolling substitutions in financial markets: did quantitative easing in 2020 lead to portfolio rebalancing?

Jack Worlidge

Purchases of government bonds have been a prominent tool that has helped central banks meet inflation objectives when short-term interest rates have been constrained by their effective lower bounds. But how does QE work? There are a range of channels through which QE can/might operate, though there remains uncertainty over the relative size and importance of these channels. This post presents new evidence from granular transaction data consistent with a portfolio rebalancing channel. Specifically, during the Bank’s latest QE programme (known as QE5) investors were found to have bought less new gilt issuance and bought more risky assets like corporate bonds.

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Monetary and fiscal policy in interwar Britain

David Ronicle

Macroeconomic outcomes in Britain’s interwar years were terrible – they featured two of modern Britain’s worst recessions, unemployment twice peaked above 20% and was rarely below 10% and there were two periods of chronic deflation. Policy, meanwhile, was pulled in multiple directions by multiple objectives – employment, price and financial stability and debt sustainability. These challenges gave birth to modern macroeconomics, inspiring the work of John Maynard Keynes. In a new working paper, I apply modern empirical techniques to look at the period with fresh eyes. I find that monetary and fiscal policy played a central role in macroeconomic developments – and that outcomes could have been better had policymakers been less wedded to the traditional policy consensus, and especially the Gold Standard.

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Booming entrepreneurship during the Covid-19 pandemic

Saleem Bahaj, Sophie Piton and Anthony Savagar

Recessions typically discourage entrepreneurs from starting new businesses. During the Great Recession, a ‘generation’ of start-ups went missing which contributed to a slow recovery in employment. Two years after the pandemic started, evidence for the UK suggests a very different story: the pandemic inspired many entrepreneurs to start new businesses and this supported the recovery in employment.

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