This Detailed Assessment of the Observance of International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) Objectives and Principles of Securities Regulation for Portugal assesses the securities market. The legal and regulatory framework authorizes banks to provide investment services under a...

This paper presents a technical note on Crisis Management Arrangements for the United States. The crisis has seen widespread systemic instability, large-scale fiscal support, and an increase in moral hazard. The lack of a formal systematic process for the assessment of risks may have contributed...

South Africa has made substantial progress in addressing the recommendations of the Financial Sector Assessment Program and is continuing to build upon these accomplishments. The Financial Services Board and Department of Trade and Industry both are organizations with the legal authority to...

Singapore’s financial sector, which is dominated by the banking sector, remains robust despite a series of economic downturns and substantial asset price declines. Economic developments in the past few years have highlighted Singapore’s vulnerability to exogenous shocks, including...

This paper highlights key findings of the Financial System Stability Assessment, including Reports on the Observance of Standards and Codes on Monetary and Financial Policy Transparency, Banking Supervision, and Securities Regulation for Chile. The assessment reveals the Chilean banking system...

This paper proposes a framework for the surveillance of financial institutions' derivatives activities. The designed framework builds on information likely to be collected by financial market regulators for supervisory purposes, and/or information collected by market participants for the purpose...

This paper assesses proposals to redefine the scope of activities of systemically important financial institutions. Alongside reform of prudential regulation and oversight, these have been offered as solutions to the too-important-to-fail problem. It is argued that while the more radical of...

This paper assesses financial integration in Asia in terms of risk-sharing benefit versus financial-contagion cost. We construct a new measure of risk sharing based on a term structure model, which allows identification of realized stochastic discount factors. Risk sharing is low in Asia, and...

The availability of financial instruments related to indices that track global financial conditions and risk appetite can potentially offer countries alternative options to insure against external shocks. This paper shows that while these instruments can explain much of the in-sample variation...