Corporate insolvencies reaching record highs: a look under the hood

Jelle Barkema

How concerned should policymakers be as UK business insolvencies have soared to 60-year highs? This phenomenon has been extensively covered in the media; with media outlets attributing the record-breaking numbers to a ‘perfect storm’ of energy prices, supply-chain disruptions and the cost of living squeeze. Insolvencies are a popular measure of economic distress because they have implications for both the financial system and the real economy. For the financial system, an insolvency generally means creditors will incur losses. Insolvent firms will have to cease trading and lay off workers, which affects the real economy. In this blog post, I assess the evolution of corporate insolvencies over time, including the post-Covid surge to understand what these record numbers mean for the UK economy.

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What does the rise in the inflation mean for financial stability?

Kristina Bluwstein, Sudipto Karmakar and David Aikman

Introduction

Inflation reached almost 9% in July 2022, its highest reading since the early 1990s. A large proportion of the working age population will never have experienced such price increases, or the prospect of higher interest rates to bring inflation back under control. In recent years, many commentators have been concerned about risks to financial stability from the prolonged period of low rates, including the possibility of financial institutions searching for yield by taking on riskier debt structures. But what about the opposite case? What financial stability risks do high inflation and increasing interest rates pose?

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Strengthening the resilience of market-based finance

Naoto Takemoto, Simon Jurkatis and Nicholas Vause

In less than two decades, the system of market-based finance (MBF) – which involves mainly non-bank financial institutions (NBFIs) providing credit to the economy through bonds rather than loans – has both mitigated and amplified the economic effects of financial crises. It mitigated effects after the global financial crisis (GFC), when it substituted for banks in providing credit. But it amplified effects at the outbreak of the Covid pandemic, when NBFIs propagated a dash for cash (DFC), and more recently when pension fund gilt sales exacerbated increases in yields. This post outlines five different aspects of MBF that contribute to such amplification and summarises some policy proposals – suggested and debated internationally by regulators, academics and market participants – to make MBF more resilient.

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Swing or amiss: are fund pricing rules good for financial stability?

Benjamin King and Jamie Semark

Open-ended funds (OEFs) offer daily redemptions to investors, often while holding illiquid assets that take longer to sell. There is evidence that this mismatch creates an incentive for investors to redeem ahead of others, which could lead to large redemptions from OEFs and asset price falls. Some research has suggested that ‘swing pricing’ can help to moderate these redemptions, but until now, no-one has considered the impact of its use on the wider economy. In a recent paper, we carry out a financial stability cost-benefit analysis of more widespread and consistent usage of swing pricing by OEFs, finding that enhanced swing pricing could reduce amplification of shocks to corporate bond prices, providing benefits to the financial system and economy.

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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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Uncertainty in financial crisis prediction: a Bayesian approach

Jack Page

Systemic financial crises occur infrequently, giving relatively few crisis observations to feed into the models that try to warn when a crisis is on the horizon. So how certain are these models? And can policymakers trust them when making vital decisions related to financial stability? In this blog, I build a Bayesian neural network to predict financial crises. I show that such a framework can effectively quantify the uncertainty inherent in prediction.

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Pinning the tail on the economy: why domestic developments aren’t enough

Simon Lloyd and Ed Manuel

Central banks don’t just care about what is expected to happen. They also care about what could happen if things turn out worse than expected. In line with this, an emerging literature has developed models for measuring and predicting overall levels of macroeconomic risk. This body of work has focused on estimating the level of ‘tail risk‘ in a country by monitoring a range of domestic developments. But this misses a key part of the picture. In a recent Staff Working Paper, we show that monitoring developments abroad is as important as monitoring developments at home when assessing the vulnerability of the economy to a severe downturn.

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The leverage ratio: a balance between risk and safety

Jonathan Smith

What was the root cause of the financial crisis? Ask any economist or banker and undoubtedly they will at some point mention leverage (see e.g. here, here and here). Yet when a capital requirement based on leverage — the leverage ratio requirement — was introduced, fierce criticism followed (see e.g. here and here). Drawing on the insights from a working paper, and thinking about the main criticism — that a leverage ratio requirement could cause excessive risk-taking — this seems not to have been the case.

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Wir sind die Roboter: can we predict financial crises?

Kristina Bluwstein, Marcus Buckmann, Andreas Joseph, Miao Kang, Sujit Kapadia and Özgür Şimşek

Financial crises are recurrent events in economic history. But they are as rare as a Kraftwerk album, making their prediction challenging. In a recent study, we apply robots — in the form of machine learning — to a long-run dataset spanning 140 years, 17 countries and almost 50 crises, successfully predicting almost all crises up to two years ahead. We identify the key economic drivers of our models using Shapley values. The most important predictors are credit growth and the yield curve slope, both domestically and globally. A flat or inverted yield curve is of most concern when interest rates are low and credit growth is high. In such zones of heightened crisis vulnerability, it may be valuable to deploy macroprudential policies.

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Market fragility in the pandemic era

Gerardo Ferrara, Maria Flora and Roberto Renò

Financial markets process orders faster now than ever before. However, they remain prone to occasional dysfunction where prices move away from fundamentals. One important type of market fragility is flash events. Identifying such events is crucial to understanding them and their effects. This post displays the results from a new methodology to identify these, but also longer lasting V-shaped events, as we show here with an application to three sovereign bond markets.

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