The bankers' new clothes Admati, Anat; Admati, Anat; Hellwig, Martin
2014., 20130215, 2013-02-15, 2014-03-23, 20130101, ♭2013, 2013
eBook
What is wrong with today's banking system? The past few years have shown that risks in banking can impose significant costs on the economy. Many claim, however, that a safer banking system would ...require sacrificing lending and economic growth.The Bankers' New Clothesexamines this claim and the narratives used by bankers, politicians, and regulators to rationalize the lack of reform, exposing them as invalid.
Admati and Hellwig argue we can have a safer and healthier banking system without sacrificing any of the benefits of the system, and at essentially no cost to society. They show that banks are as fragile as they are not because they must be, but because they want to be--and they get away with it. Whereas this situation benefits bankers, it distorts the economy and exposes the public to unnecessary risks. Weak regulation and ineffective enforcement allowed the buildup of risks that ushered in the financial crisis of 2007-2009. Much can be done to create a better system and prevent crises. Yet the lessons from the crisis have not been learned.
Admati and Hellwig seek to engage the broader public in the debate by cutting through the jargon of banking, clearing the fog of confusion, and presenting the issues in simple and accessible terms.The Bankers' New Clothescalls for ambitious reform and outlines specific and highly beneficial steps that can be taken immediately.
After the Crash Sharyn O'Halloran, Thomas Groll
10/2019
eBook
The 2008 crash was the worst financial crisis and the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression. It triggered a complete overhaul of the global regulatory environment, ushering in a ...stream of new rules and laws to combat the perceived weakness of the financial system. While the global economy came back from the brink, the continuing effects of the crisis include increasing economic inequality and political polarization. After the Crash is an innovative analysis of the crisis and its ongoing influence on the global regulatory, financial, and political landscape, with timely discussions of the key issues for our economic future. It brings together a range of experts and practitioners, including Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winner; former congressman Barney Frank; former treasury secretary Jacob Lew; Paul Tucker, a former deputy governor of the Bank of England; and Steve Cutler, general counsel of JP Morgan Chase during the financial crisis. Each poses crucial questions: What were the origins of the crisis? How effective were international and domestic regulatory responses? Have we addressed the roots of the crisis through reform and regulation? Are our financial systems and the global economy better able to withstand another crash?After the Crash is vital reading as both a retrospective on the last crisis and an analysis of possible sources of the next one.
Unelected Power Tucker, Paul
2019, 2018., 20180522, 2018, 2019-10-08, 2018-05-22
eBook
Guiding principles for ensuring that central bankers and other unelected policymakers remain stewards of the common good Central bankers have emerged from the financial crisis as the third great ...pillar of unelected power alongside the judiciary and the military. They pull the regulatory and financial levers of our economic well-being, yet unlike democratically elected leaders, their power does not come directly from the people. Unelected Power lays out the principles needed to ensure that central bankers, technocrats, regulators, and other agents of the administrative state remain stewards of the common good and do not become overmighty citizens. Paul Tucker draws on a wealth of personal experience from his many years in domestic and international policymaking to tackle the big issues raised by unelected power, and enriches his discussion with examples from the United States, Britain, France, Germany, and the European Union. Blending economics, political theory, and public law, Tucker explores the necessary conditions for delegated but politically insulated power to be legitimate in the eyes of constitutional democracy and the rule of law. He explains why the solution must fit with how real-world government is structured, and why technocrats and their political overseers need incentives to make the system work as intended. Tucker explains how the regulatory state need not be a fourth branch of government free to steer by its own lights, and how central bankers can emulate the best of judicial self-restraint and become models of dispersed power. Like it or not, unelected power has become a hallmark of modern government. This critically important book shows how to harness it to the people's purposes.
Diversification disasters Ibragimov, Rustam; Jaffee, Dwight; Walden, Johan
Journal of financial economics,
02/2011, Volume:
99, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The recent financial crisis has revealed significant externalities and systemic risks that arise from the interconnectedness of financial intermediaries’ risk portfolios. We develop a model in which ...the negative externality arises because intermediaries’ actions to diversify that are optimal for individual intermediaries may prove to be suboptimal for society. We show that the externality depends critically on the distributional properties of the risks. The optimal social outcome involves less risk-sharing, but also a lower probability for massive collapses of intermediaries. We derive the exact conditions under which risk-sharing restrictions create a socially preferable outcome. Our analysis has implications for regulation of financial institutions and risk management.
Islamic finance is growing at an astonishing rate and is now a 1200 billion industry, with operations in over 100 countries. This book explains the paradox of a system rooted in the medieval era ...thriving in the global economy. Coverage is exhaustively comprehensive, defining Islamic finance in its broadest sense to include banks, mutual funds, securities firms and insurance (or takaful) companies. The author places Islamic finance in the context of the global political and economic system and covers a wide variety of issues such as the underlying principles of Islamic finance, the range of Islamic financial products, and country differences. He also discusses a number of economic, political, regulatory and religious concerns and challenges. This second edition has been completely revised and updated to take into account the great changes and developments in the field in recent times. It includes the impact of the 9/11 and 7/7 terrorist attacks on the industry, the new forms of interaction with Western financial institutions, the emergence of innovative products such as sukuk, attempts by a broad range of financial centres - including Kuala Lumpur, London, Singapore, Bahrain and Dubai - to become global hubs of Islamic finance, and the repercussions of the 2008 global financial meltdown on Islamic institutions.
This paper conducts the first empirical assessment of theories concerning risk taking by banks, their ownership structures, and national bank regulations. We focus on conflicts between bank managers ...and owners over risk, and we show that bank risk taking varies positively with the comparative power of shareholders within the corporate governance structure of each bank. Moreover, we show that the relation between bank risk and capital regulations, deposit insurance policies, and restrictions on bank activities depends critically on each bank's ownership structure, such that the actual sign of the marginal effect of regulation on risk varies with ownership concentration. These findings show that the same regulation has different effects on bank risk taking depending on the bank's corporate governance structure.
This paper argues that the extent of financial contagion exhibits a form of phase transition: as long as the magnitude of negative shocks offecting financial institutions are sufficiently small, a ...more densely connected financial network (corresponding to a more diversified pattern of interbank liabilities) enhances financial stability. However, beyond a certain point, dense interconnections serve as a mechanism for the propagation of shocks, leading to a more fragile financial system. Our results thus highlight that the same factors that contribute to resilience under certain conditions may function as significant sources of systemic risk under others.
Measuring Systemic Risk Acharya, Viral V.; Pedersen, Lasse H.; Philippon, Thomas ...
The Review of financial studies,
01/2017, Volume:
30, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
We present an economic model of systemic risk in which undercapitalization of the financial sector as a whole is assumed to harm the real economy, leading to a systemic risk externality. Each ...financial institution's contribution to systemic risk can be measured as its systemic expected shortfall (SES), that is, its propensity to be undercapitalized when the system as a whole is undercapitalized. SES increases in the institution's leverage and its marginal expected shortfall (MES), that is, its losses in the tail of the system's loss distribution. We demonstrate empirically the ability of components of SES to predict emerging systemic risk during the financial crisis of 2007–2009.
Trust in financial institutions: A survey Cruijsen, Carin; Haan, Jakob; Roerink, Ria
Journal of economic surveys,
September 2023, Volume:
37, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Trust in financial institutions is widely considered important. However, a clear overview of studies on the drivers of trust is missing. We intend to fill this gap in the literature. After discussing ...why trust in financial institutions is important, we turn to its measurement, where we distinguish between trust in one's own institution and trust in institutions in general (narrow‐scope and broad‐scope trust), and discuss how these measures differ from generalized trust (i.e. trust in other people with whom there is no direct relationship). Finally, we survey the determinants of trust in financial institutions and discuss a wide range of drivers. First, trust in financial institutions depends on the economic situation: it behaves procyclically and is negatively affected by financial crises. Second, the behavior of financial institutions matters: prudent conduct, the provision of good services and financial health have a positive effect on trust. Third, although consumer characteristics also relate to trust, many of these relationships are context‐dependent. Fourth, there is a positive association between narrow‐scope trust on the one hand and broad‐scope trust and generalized trust on the other. Last, policy measures and supervisory actions can help prevent loss of trust.
We analyze whether four market-based measures of the global systemic importance of financial institutions offer early warning signals during three financial crises. The tests based on the 2007–2008 ...crisis show that only one measure (△CoVaR) consistently adds predictive power to conventional early warning models. However, the additional predictive power remains small and it is not normally confirmed for the Asian and the 1998 crises. We conclude that it is problematic to identify a market-based measure of systemic importance that remains valid across crises with different features. The same criticism also applies to several conventional proxies of systemic importance, of which size is the most consistent performer.
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