The heavy losses in bank asset portfolios do not reflect an inherent failure of markets to monitor risk adequately but rather the perverse incentives of the financial safety net to excessive risk-taking. The unsustainable rise in house prices and their subsequent sharp decline derived from the combination of a public policy to expand home ownership to unrealistic levels and from a financial safety net that encouraged excessive risk-taking by banks. Charts and tables.
In this paper, we provide an overview of the concerns surrounding the variations in the calculation of risk-weighted assets (RWAs) across banks and jurisdictions and how this might undermine the Basel III capital adequacy framework. We discuss the key drivers behind the differences in these calculations, drawing upon a sample of systemically important banks from Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific. We then discuss a range of policy options that could be explored to fix the actual and perceived problems with RWAs, and improve the use of risk-sensitive capital ratios.
A Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Bloomberg Businessweek Book of the Year Why our banking system is broken—and what we must do to fix it New bank failures have been a rude awakening for everyone who believed that the banking industry was reformed after the Global Financial Crisis—and that we’d never again have to choose between massive bailouts and financial havoc. The Bankers’ New Clothes uncovers just how little things have changed—and why banks are still so dangerous. Writing in clear language that anyone can understand, Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig debunk the false and misleading claims of bankers, regulators, politicians, academics, and others who oppose effective reform, and they explain how the banking system can be made safer and healthier. Thoroughly updated for a world where bank failures have made a dramatic return, this acclaimed and important book now features a new preface and four new chapters that expose the shortcomings of current policies and reveal how the dominance of banking even presents dangers to the rule of law and democracy itself.
Until about twenty years ago, the consensus view on the cause of financial-system distress was fairly simple: a run on one bank could easily turn to a panic involving runs on all banks, destroying some and disrupting the financial system. Since then, however, a series of events—such as emerging-market debt crises, bond-market meltdowns, and the Long-Term Capital Management episode—has forced a rethinking of the risks facing financial institutions and the tools available to measure and manage these risks. The Risks of Financial Institutions examines the various risks affecting financial institutions and explores a variety of methods to help institutions and regulators more accurately measure and forecast risk. The contributors--from academic institutions, regulatory organizations, and banking--bring a wide range of perspectives and experience to the issue. The result is a volume that points a way forward to greater financial stability and better risk management of financial institutions.
The evolution of risk management has resulted from the interplay of financial crises, risk management practices, and regulatory actions. In the 1970s, research lay the intellectual foundations for the risk management practices that were systematically implemented in the 1980s as bond trading revolutionized Wall Street. Quants developed dynamic hedging, Value-at-Risk, and credit risk models based on the insights of financial economics. In parallel, the Basel I framework created a level playing field among banks across countries. Following the 1987 stock market crash, the near failure of Salomon Brothers, and the failure of Drexel Burnham Lambert, in 1996 the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision published the Market Risk Amendment to the Basel I Capital Accord; the amendment went into effect in 1998. It led to a migration of bank risk management practices toward market risk regulations. The framework was further developed in the Basel II Accord, which, however, from the very beginning, was labeled as being procyclical due to the reliance of capital requirements on contemporaneous volatility estimates. Indeed, the failure to measure and manage risk adequately can be viewed as a key contributor to the 2008 global financial crisis. Subsequent innovations in risk management practices have been dominated by regulatory innovations, including capital and liquidity stress testing, macroprudential surcharges, resolution regimes, and countercyclical capital requirements.
This sixth peer review of the OECD Principles of Corporate Governance analyses the corporate governance framework and practices relating to corporate risk management, in the private sector and in state-owned enterprises. The review covers 26 jurisdictions and is based on a general survey of all participating jurisdictions in December 2012, as well as an in-depth review of corporate risk management in Norway, Singapore and Switzerland. The report finds that while risk-taking is a fundamental driving force in business and entrepreneurship, the cost of risk management failures is often underestimated, both externally and internally, including the cost in terms of management time needed to rectify the situation. The reports thus concludes that corporate governance should ensure that risks are understood, managed, and, when appropriate, communicated.
Government support to banks through the provision of explicit or implicit guarantees affects the willingness of banks to take on risk by reducing market discipline or by increasing charter value. We use an international sample of bank data and government support to banks for the periods 2003-2004 and 2009-2010. We find that more government support is associated with more risk taking by banks, especially during the financial crisis (2009-10). We also find that restricting banks' range of activities ameliorates the moral hazard problem. We conclude that strengthening market discipline in the banking sector is needed to address this moral hazard problem.
The potential failure of a large bank presents vexing questions for policymakers. It poses significant risks to other financial institutions, to the financial system as a whole, and possibly to the economic and social order. Because of such fears, policymakers in many countries—developed and less developed, democratic and autocratic—respond by protecting bank creditors from all or some of the losses they otherwise would face. Failing banks are labeled "too big to fail" (or TBTF). This important new book examines the issues surrounding TBTF, explaining why it is a problem and discussing ways of dealing with it more effectively. Gary Stern and Ron Feldman, officers with the Federal Reserve, warn that not enough has been done to reduce creditors' expectations of TBTF protection. Many of the existing pledges and policies meant to convince creditors that they will bear market losses when large banks fail are not credible, resulting in significant net costs to the economy. The authors recommend that policymakers enact a series of reforms to reduce expectations of bailouts when large banks fail.
