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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Covid-19 briefing: epi-macro 101

Cristiano Cantore, Federico Di Pace, Riccardo M Masolo, Silvia Miranda-Agrippino and Arthur Turrell

The Covid-19 crisis has led to a swift shift in the emphasis of macroeconomic research. At the centre of this is a new field of inquiry called ‘epi-macro’ that combines epidemiological models with macroeconomic models. In this post, we give a brief introduction to some of the earliest papers in this fast-growing literature.

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Covid-19 briefing: post-lockdown macro

Michael Kumhof

In the wake of Covid-19 lockdown, macroeconomic policymakers have to deal not only with the immediate contraction in the economy, but also with the medium and longer term macro-consequences. Over the past four months, the macroeconomic literature on these topics has expanded rapidly. This post reviews the literature that considers the channels via which the shock affects the economy, and the macroeconomic policy options for dealing with the aftermath, taking as given the shock caused by the virus and the lockdown.

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Bitesize: Emerging market currency risk: evidence from the COVID-19 crisis

Simon Lloyd, Giancarlo Corsetti and Emile Marin

A striking regularity around global economic crises is that the dollar tends to appreciate sharply against emerging market (EM) currencies as capital flows out of EMs. In this respect, the adjustments observed since the onset of the COVID pandemic are no exception. Since the end of February, EM currencies have depreciated by around 15% (on average) and non-resident portfolio outflows from EMs summed to nearly $100 billion over a period of 45 days.

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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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Economic uncertainty before and during the COVID-19 pandemic

Dave Altig, Scott Baker, Jose Maria Barrero, Nick Bloom, Philip Bunn, Scarlet Chen, Steven J. Davis, Julia Leather, Brent Meyer, Emil Mihaylov, Paul Mizen, Nick Parker, Thomas Renault, Pawel Smietanka and Greg Thwaites.

The unprecedented scale and nature of the COVID-19 crisis has generated an extraordinary surge in economic uncertainty. In a recent paper we review what has happened to different indicators of uncertainty in the US and UK before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Three results emerge. All of the indicators that we consider show huge jumps in uncertainty in reaction to the pandemic and its economic fallout. Most indicators reach their highest values on record, although the extent of the increases differ. The time paths also differ: implied stock market volatility rose rapidly from late February, peaked in mid-March, and fell back by late March as stock prices partly recovered. In contrast, broader measures peaked later.

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Consumption in the time of a pandemic: tracking UK consumption in real time

Sinem Hacioglu Hoke, Diego Kaenzig and Paolo Surico

The response to the Covid-19 pandemic has included closure of retail outlets and social distancing. How large was the resulting consumption fall in the UK? In a new paper, we try to answer this question using a transaction-level dataset of over 8 million individual transactions. This gives a near-real time read on consumer spending, without the publication lags associated with national accounts consumption data. We find that the bulk of the fall had occurred before legally mandated lockdown started. The largest declines occurred in retail, restaurants and transport, but spending on some items such as online shopping, alcohol and tobacco rose. There is substantial variation in change in consumption across age, income group, housing tenure and local authority.

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Covid-19 Briefing: International Trade and Supply Chains

Rebecca Freeman and Rana Sajedi

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to both a decline in economic activity that has been propagated across borders through global supply networks, and a rise in barriers to trade between countries. This has led to a rapidly emerging literature seeking to understand the effects of the pandemic on trade. This post surveys some of the key contributions of that literature. Key messages from early papers are that: i) The shock is a hit to both demand and supply, and is thus deeper than what was experienced during the 2008/09 Great Trade Collapse; ii) Global value chains have amplified cross-country spillovers; iii) When supply chains are highly integrated, protectionist measures can disrupt production of medical equipment and supplies; and, hence, iv) Keeping international trade open during the crisis can help to limit the economic cost of the pandemic and foster global growth during the recovery.

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Covid-19 Briefing: Corporate Balance Sheets

Neeltje van Horen

Faced with unprecedented declines in corporate revenue, the Covid-19 shock represents a loss of cash flow of indeterminate duration for many firms. It is too early to tell how exactly firms will be affected by this crisis and how scarring it will be, but the crisis will likely have a significant impact on most corporates. This post reviews the literature on factors affecting firms’ ability to withstand the Covid-19 shock and what large corporates did to shore up their finances.

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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.