Debt and investment: what can we learn from SMEs’ investment behaviour during and after the Global Financial Crisis?

Mai Daher and Christiane Kneer

Many UK firms weathered the Covid shock by taking on debt. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in particular borrowed at an unprecedented rate and their debt increased by around a quarter since end-2019. But debt that allowed SMEs to survive the pandemic could now hamper the recovery as indebted firms may struggle to invest and grow. Debt on SMEs’ balance sheets could also make firms more vulnerable to future shocks and could amplify downturns if indebted firms reduce investment more following shocks. To understand how investment might evolve, our recent FS paper examines how leverage affected SME investment during and after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and discusses potential differences given regulatory and other changes since the GFC.

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Credit, crises and inequality

Jonathan Bridges, Georgina Green and Mark Joy

Any distributional effects on credit of macroprudential policies are only one part of the distributional story. Relatively little is known about how such policies affect the income distribution in the longer term via their role in preventing crises or mitigating their severity. Our paper helps to fill that gap in the literature by looking at the impact of past recessions and crises on inequality, and the amplifying roles of credit and capital within that. This helps to shed light on the distributional implications of not intervening – in the form of an amplified recession. We find that inequality rises following recessions and that rapid credit growth prior to recessions exacerbates that effect by around 40%.

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On the origin of systemic risk

Giovanni Covi, Mattia Montagna and Gabriele Torri

Systemic risk in the bank sector is often associated with long periods of economic downturn and large social costs. In a new paper, we develop a microstructural contagion model to disentangle and quantify the different sources of systemic risk for the euro-area banking system. Calibrated to granular euro-area data, we estimate that the probability of a systemic banking crisis was around 3.6% in 2018. Seventy per cent of the risk stems from economic risks, with fire sales and contagion risk accounting for most of the remainder and only a small role for interbank exposures. Our findings suggest that correlations among banks’ losses play a crucial role in the origins of systemic risk.

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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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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 19^th 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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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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Possible pitfalls of a 1-in-X approach to financial stability

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.

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‘The world turned upside down’: How the global economy was hit by the crisis

David Young

For the global economy, it was the best of times, and then it was the worst of times. Buoyed by very strong growth in emerging markets, the global economy boomed in the mid-2000s. On average, annualised world GDP growth exceeded 5% for the four years leading up to 2007 – a pace of growth that hadn’t been sustained since the early 1970s. But it wasn’t to last. In this post, I illustrate how the failure of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 coincided with the deepest, most synchronised global downturn since World War II. And I describe how after having seen the fallout of the Lehman collapse, macroeconomic forecasters were nevertheless surprised by the magnitude of the ensuing global recession.

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‘Running for the exit’: How cross-border bank lending fell

Neeltje van Horen

Cross-border bank lending fell dramatically in the aftermath of Lehman Brothers’ failure as funding constraints forced banks to reduce their foreign exposures. While this decline was partly driven by lower demand for international bank credit, it was substantially aggravated by a retrenchment of international banks from cross-border lending. But banks did not cut their cross-border lending in a uniform manner. Instead, they reallocated their foreign portfolios towards countries that were geographically close, in which they had more experience, in which they had close connections with domestic banks or in which they operated a subsidiary. The crisis thus showed that deeper financial integration is associated with more stable cross-border credit when large global banks are hit by a funding shock.

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Bitesize: The rise and fall of interest only mortgages

Sachin Galaiya

The interest-only product has undergone tremendous evolution, from its mass-market glory days in the run-up to the crisis, to its rebirth as a niche product. However, since reaching a low-point in 2016, the interest-only market is starting to show signs of life again as lenders re-enter the market.

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