Zahid Amadxarif, James Brookes, Nicola Garbarino, Rajan Patel and Eryk Walczak
The banking reforms that followed the financial crisis of 2007-08 led to an increase in UK banking regulation from almost 400,000 to over 720,000 words. Did the increase in the length of regulation lead to an increase in complexity?
Continue reading “The language of rules: textual complexity in banking reforms”Zahid Amadxarif, Paula Gallego Marquez and Nic Garbarino
“We’ve done a lot to lower prudential barriers to entry into the banking sector […] but have we done enough to lower the equivalent barriers to growth?” asked PRA CEO Sam Woods in a recent speech. To make regulation proportionate, policymakers adapt regulatory requirements to the risks posed by each firm. But regulators face a trade-off between addressing systemic risks in a proportionate way and limiting regulatory complexity. New thresholds can create complexity and cliff-edge effects that can discourage healthy firms from growing. We identify regulatory thresholds for UK banks and building societies using textual analysis on a new dataset that contains the universe of prudential rules.
Continue reading “Setting boundaries: finding thresholds in bank regulation”Matteo Benetton, Philippe Bracke, João F Cocco and Nicola Garbarino
Academics have made the case for mortgage products with equity features, so that gains and losses due to fluctuations in house values are shared between the household and an outside investor. In theory, the equity component expands the set of affordable properties, without increasing household debt, and default risk. These products have not become mainstream, but in a recent paper, we study a large UK experiment with equity-based housing finance — the Help To Buy Equity Loan scheme. We find that equity loans are mainly used to overcome credit constraints, rather than to reduce investment risk. Unconstrained household prefer mortgage debt over equity loans, suggesting optimism about house price risk. Equity loans could still contribute to house price inflation: we don’t find evidence that houses purchased with equity loans are overpriced, but an assessment of the aggregate effects is beyond the scope of the paper.
Continue reading “Housing consumption and investment: evidence from the Help to Buy scheme”Adam Brinley Codd and Andrew Gimber
Meteorologists and insurers talk about the “1-in-100 year storm”. Should regulators do the same for financial crises? In this post, we argue that false confidence in people’s ability to calculate probabilities of rare events might end up worsening the crises regulators are trying to prevent.
Continue reading “Possible pitfalls of a 1-in-X approach to financial stability”
Prudential policies have grown in popularity as a tool for addressing financial stability risks since the 2007-09 global financial crisis. Yet their effects are still debated, with sanguine and more pessimistic viewpoints. In a recent Bank of England Staff Working Paper, we assess the extent to which emerging market (EM) prudential policies can partially insulate their domestic economies against the spillovers from US monetary policy. Using a database of prudential policies implemented by EMs since 2000, our estimates indicate that each additional prudential policy tightening can dampen the decline in total credit following a US monetary policy tightening by around 20%. This suggests that domestic prudential policies allow EMs to insulate themselves somewhat from global shocks.
David Bholat and Karla Martinez Gutierrez
Around the world, central banks have a number of different ownership structures. At one end of the spectrum are central banks, like the Bank of England, that are wholly owned by the public sector. At the other end are central banks, like the Banca d’Italia, whose shareholders are wholly private sector entities. And there are central banks, like the Bank of Japan, that lie in-between. But do these differences matter?
In this blog post, we explore the variety of central bank ownership structures, both historically and globally. We also suggest areas for future research on the topic.
Jonathan Smith and Gerardo Ferrara
Just like the beginning of an unforeseen family argument, two key tenets of the post-crisis reforms have unexpectedly started to butt heads: the leverage ratio capital requirement and the mandatory requirement to centrally clear certain over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives.
Continue reading “New banking regulation: is it affecting the clearing of derivatives?”
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.
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.
Continue reading “Give me more! Higher Capital Requirements and Loan Collateralisation”Giulio Malberti and Thom Adcock
In late 2017, Bitcoin was in the spotlight for its extraordinary return. But how volatile is it?
To consider Bitcoin volatility, we look at 10-day returns (capital standards typically estimate market risk over a 10-day period) since 19 July 2010, when Bloomberg’s Bitcoin data start. We compare Bitcoin with assets in three categories – currency pairs, commodities and equities – and for each we have picked one low-volatility asset and one more volatile asset. For currency pairs and commodities, we chose the most and least volatile ones (in terms of standard deviation of 10-day returns) out of the most liquid in each category. And we chose the most and least volatile FTSE 100 equities (again, in terms of standard deviation of 10-day returns).
For stable assets we expect a peaked distribution with short tails, as returns cluster near 0%. Figure 1 shows that Bitcoin has been more volatile than any other asset in our sample.
Figure 1
But people are often interested in the downside risk of assets. We therefore consider how Bitcoin’s Value at Risk (VaR) compares to other assets. VaR is the maximum loss over a given time interval under normal market conditions at a given confidence interval (eg 99%). A 10-day 99% VaR of -10% tells you that 99% of the time your 10-day return on the asset would be no worse than a 10% loss.
Figure 2 shows Bitcoin’s VaR is high, but the VaR of the other most liquid crypto-assets is higher. TRON’s VaR to date (-84%) is almost twice Bitcoin’s (-44%).
Figure 2
Giulio Malberti and Thom Adcock work in the Bank’s Banking Policy Division.
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