A highly leveraged financial system is one prone to collapse. This notion underlies modern financial regulation: the control of systemic risk requires controlling leverage. And, it is what drives proposals for high capital requirements and to tax leverage. But, as is always the case with regulation, the devil is in the details. For one thing, we need a way to measure leverage. This turns out to be a surprisingly difficult task. Second, while risk varies positively with leverage, risk-taking can increase without increasing leverage, so we need to think about all major forms of risk-taking that can threaten financial stability...
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Despite mixed evidence, concerns about a decline of bond market liquidity persist. The typical worry is that a sudden decline in bond demand will cause prices to plunge and have serious knock-on effects.
Naturally, the issue merits attention: episodes in which market liquidity disappears rapidly can be disruptive (witness the flash crashes and flash rallies in various equity and bond markets in recent years). However, these incidents tend to be fleeting. Instead, from the perspective of financial stability, funding liquidity is the greater source of vulnerability...
Some time ago, we wrote about how the Fed and the ECB’s governance and communication were converging. Our focus was on the policy, governance and communications framework, including the 2% inflation objective, the voting rotation, post-meeting press conference, prompt publication of meeting minutes, and the like.
But important differences are built into the legal design of these two systems. Perhaps the most important one is the contrasting roles of the regional Federal Reserve Banks and that of the National Central Banks (NCBs)...
Read More“[W]e may well at present be seeing the first stirrings of an increase in the inflation rate--something that we would like to happen.” Stanley Fischer, Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve Board
The primary task of the central bank is to avert catastrophe, making sure that nothing really bad happens. This risk management approach imparts a natural asymmetry to policymakers’ words and deeds. Sometimes, it calls for bold, aggressive action. Others times, it means cautious plodding. Everyone agrees that 2008 was a clear case of the former. Most Federal Reserve officials argue that the current circumstance exemplifies the latter...
Read MoreLast week, a Federal District Court overturned the Financial Stability Oversight Council’s (FSOC) designation of MetLife—the nation’s largest insurer by assets—as a systemically important financial intermediary (SIFI). Until the Court unseals this decision, we won’t know why. If the ruling is based on narrow grounds that the FSOC can readily address, it will have little impact on long-run prospects for U.S. financial stability.
However, if the Court has materially raised the hurdle to SIFI designation—and if its ruling holds up on appeal—“too big to fail” nonbanks could again loom large in future financial crises, making them both more likely and more damaging...
Read MoreThe financial crisis of 2007-09 prompted two distinct types of regulatory reforms. The first uses capital and liquidity requirements to make financial institutions resilient in the face of severe macroeconomic events. The second concerns market infrastructure and the ability to trade securities and derivatives or to use them as collateral. Here, the emphasis is on both information collection through trade reporting—who is buying or selling what to whom--and on shifting transactions from over-the-counter (OTC) markets to central clearing.
This post examines central clearing of OTC derivatives and highlights its importance for financial stability...
Read MoreModern economies are built by businesses that take risk. As Edison’s defense suggests, successful risk-takers need scope to experiment without distraction. Economies lacking institutions to support risk-taking are prone to stagnation.
By securing economic and financial stability, central banks play a key role in promoting the risk-taking that is fundamental to innovation and capital formation. On rare occasions, it is officials’ bold willingness to do “whatever it takes” that does the job. More often, it is a series of moderate, gradual actions. Yet, even then, the understanding that the central bank has the broad capacity to act—and, when necessary, to do so without limit—is a key factor underpinning the stability of the system...
Read MoreSome days the tone of the financial news matches that of the sports page. Adversaries appear to be locked in an epic battle, with the official sector setting regulations in an attempt to keep the system safe on one side, and financiers pushing for rules that ensure profitability on the other. The skirmish over the level of large bank capital requirements and the clash over whether municipal bonds can be used to meet liquidity requirements are just two recent examples. (See our earlier posts here and here.)
Following the day-to-day struggle can make it hard to see who is winning. But if history is any guide, the financiers will prevail—to the benefit of their owners and managers—at the expense of systemic fragility.
Can we change this? Can we create a system with greater balance between the authorities and the institutions?
Read MoreHow and what should the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) communicate to make monetary policy most effective? That is the question addressed by this year’s U.S. Monetary Policy Forum report (Language After Liftoff: Fed Communication Away from the Zero Lower Bound).
Over the past two decades, the FOMC has made enormous strides in promoting transparency. In sharp contrast to most of its previous history, the Fed now emphasizes that transparency enhances the effectiveness of monetary policy.
Yet, central bank communication is a work in progress. And, as the new USMPF report argues, there remains scope for improvement. In our view, the simplest and most useful change that the authors recommend, and that the Fed could implement—immediately and without cost—is to “connect the dots:” that is, to link (while maintaining anonymity) the published interest rate forecasts of each FOMC participant that appear in the quarterly “dot plot” (found in the Summary of Economic Projections, or SEP) to that same person’s projections of inflation, unemployment, and economic growth.
Read MoreNot long ago, nearly everyone thought that nominal interest rates could not go below zero. Now, we have negative policy rates in the euro area and Japan, while in Sweden and Switzerland, the lowest controlled rate is below -1%. And government securities worth trillions of dollars bear negative rates, too.
When we first wrote about negative rates a year ago, we argued that the effective lower bound (ELB, rather than ZLB) for nominal rates was determined by the transactions costs of storing and transferring cash. We reasoned that the ELB might be in the range of -0.50% (minus one-half percent). Below that, we thought, there would be a move into cash, facilitated by banks and others who efficiently manage the notes for clients.
But, at the negative rates that we have seen so far, cash in circulation has not spiked. So, how much further can nominal interest rates fall? And what role should negative interest rates play in the future?
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