On 3 December EY hosted a SUERF conference on banking reform with Sir Howard Davies, the Chairman of RBS, and Dame Colette Bowe, the Chairman of the Banking Standards Board, as the two keynote speakers. Professor David Miles (Imperial College) gave the SUERF 2015 Annual Lecture on Capital and...

SUERF – The European Money and Finance Forum, the Deutsche Bundesbank and the Institute for Monetary and Financial Stability (IMFS) took the opportunity of the first anniversary of this new institution to organise a joint conference in Berlin on 8-9 November 2011. The purpose of this event was...

Index tracking requires building a portfolio of stocks (a replica) whose behaviour is as close as possible to that of a given stock index. Typically, much fewer stocks should appear in the replica than in the index, and there should be no low frequency (persistent) components in the tracking...

We present a simple model where bank runs are possible and we analyse the role of subsidization of future investment in this setting. We find that such a policy exacerbates the short-run liquidity problem for banks. Moreover, we highlight that a ‘shift in expectations’ about the keeping of...

This Paper presents a new model of the East Asian crisis that combines three elements – multiple equilibria, investment collapse, and moral hazard – in a single simple account. We locate the causes of the crisis in poor financial regulation, highly-geared financial institutions, and implicit...

The recent financial crisis teaches important lessons regarding the lender-of-last resort function. Large swap lines extended in 2007-08 from the Federal Reserve to other central banks show that the classic concept of a national last-resort lender fails to address key vulnerabilities in a...

This paper presents evidence of banks using accounting discretion to overstate the value of distressed assets. In particular, we show that the stock market applies far greater discounts to a bank’s real estate loans and mortgage-backed securities than are implicit in the book values of these...

This paper examines the extent to which individual investors provide liquidity to the stock market, and whether they are compensated for doing so.We show that the ability of aggregate retail order imbalances, contrarian in nature, to predict short-term future returns is significantly enhanced...