Stressed or in distress? How best to measure corporate vulnerability

Alice Crundwell and William Bennett

Accurate measures of the number of firms at risk of failure are becoming increasingly important for policymakers, as corporate insolvencies are continuing to rise and interest rates are expected to remain higher than over much of the past decade. The share of vulnerable firms is often assessed by looking at debt-servicing ability via the interest coverage ratio (ICR) – companies’ earnings before tax and interest divided by their interest expense. But several other factors are also associated with a higher probability of firm failure. This post will explore the merits of looking at a combination of financial indicators of corporate distress to better measure the share of firms at risk of failure and the associated level of debt at risk.

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Funding structures and resilience to shocks after a decade of regulatory reform

Kristin Forbes, Christian Friedrich and Dennis Reinhardt

Recent episodes of financial stress, including the ‘dash for cash’ at the onset of the Covid-19 (Covid) pandemic, pressure in the UK’s liability-driven investment funds in 2022, and the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in 2023, were stark reminders of the vulnerability of financial institutions to shocks that disrupt liquidity and access to funding. This post explores how the funding choices of banking systems and corporates affected their resilience during the early stages of Covid and whether subsequent policy actions were effective at mitigating financial stress. The results suggest that policy responses targeting specific structural vulnerabilities were successful at reducing financial stress.

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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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When the lights go out: why does operational risk matter for financial stability?

Rachel Adeney and Amy Fraser

Operational risk is rapidly becoming one of the most important threats to the financial system but is also one of the least well understood. Cyber attacks are regularly cited as one of the top risks faced by firms in the financial sector and one of the most challenging to manage. But they are only one part of operational risk, which includes losses from any kind of business disruption or human error, including power outages or natural disasters. In this post we discuss why operational risk matters for financial stability, how policymakers have responded to increasing risks from operational disruptions and the future challenges that may arise in this space.

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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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The macroprudential toolkit: effectiveness and interactions

Stephen Millard, Margarita Rubio and Alexandra Varadi

The 2008 global financial crisis showed the need for effective macroprudential policy. But what tools should macroprudential policy makers use and how effective are they? We examined these questions in in a recent staff working paper. We introduced different macroprudential tools into a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model of the UK economy and compared their impact on the economy and household welfare, as well as their interaction with each other and with monetary policy. We found that capital requirements reduce the effects of financial shocks. Instead, a limit on how much of borrowers’ income is spent on mortgage interest payments reduces the volatility of lending, output and inflation resulting from housing market shocks.

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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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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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