During the past two or three decades structural change in the Australian financial system has been rapid. The system has grown substantially in assets and volumes of activity, has become much more open and competitive, and has undergone some significant shifts in market shares. There has also...

In April 1993, the Basle Committee on Banking Supervision released a series of consultative papers relating to the supervisory treatment of market risk within banks' trading portfolios. The papers proposed a method of allocating capital to cover risk from banks’ trading positions in debt...

This paper discusses the determination of a capital charge to cover default risk on a netted derivatives portfolio. Different methods of setting a capital charge are investigated. Their ability to track a more sophisticated measure of credit risk is tested for Australian banks’ portfolios. The...

The paper gives an overview of recent work in the development of the RBII macroeconomic model, focussing on adjustments designed to reflect the post-deregulation financial environment. Changes to the RBII model have been made in two main areas. First, a clearing market for short-term funds has...

This paper investigates simple monetary policy rules using a theoretical model of a small open economy. The anlysis is intended to highlight two problems in policy formulation that are of particular importance to Australia: instability of the money demand function, and exposure of the economy to...

Economic theory offers two distinct approaches to the modelling of interest rates. At the microeconomic level, interest rates are modelled as an outcome of intertemporal optimisation by investors, so that real interest rates are determined entirely by the real variables that characterise risk....

This paper provides a theoretical analysis of monetary policy rules specified in terms of an interest rate instrument, in contrast to the usual assumption that the instrument is a monetary quantity. The analysis is presented using a neoclassical dynamic model. It begins by summarising some...