Although the United States and the European Union were both seriously impacted by the financial crisis of 2007, resulting policy debates and regulatory responses have differed considerably on the two sides of the Atlantic. In this paper the authors examine the debates on the problem posed by...

Bank regulation might have contributed to or even reinforced adverse systemic shocks that materialised during the financial crisis. Capital regulation based on risk-weighted assets encourages innovation designed to circumvent regulatory requirements and shifts banks’ focus away from their core...

Unlike the official view which ascribes the current crisis to some anomalies of the securitisation processes, and consistently proposes minor adjustments to the existing regulatory apparatus, our opinion is that we are facing the last episode of a string of crises originated by the structural...

A financial crisis leads to a debt overhang in the banking sector and subsequently to a credit crunch. In most cases, it is not possible to remedy this situation without economic policy measures. In this study, we use a uniform framework to analyze how banks in a crisis situation can be...

Financial regulation today is largely framed by traditional business categories. The financial markets, however, have begun to bypass those categories, principally over the last thirty years. Chief among the changes has been convergence in the products and services offered by traditional...

With the Great Recession and the regulatory reform that followed, the search for reliable means to capture systemic risk and to detect macrofinancial problems has become a central concern. In the United States, this concern has been institutionalized through the Financial Stability Oversight...

The global economy has a chronic shortage of safe assets which lies behind many recent macroeconomic imbalances. This paper provides a simple model of the Safe Asset Mechanism (SAM), its recessionary safety traps, and its policy antidotes. Safety traps share many common features with...

Banks cannot be made fail-safe. But they can be made safe to fail, so that the failure of a bank need not disrupt the economy at large nor pose cost to the taxpayer. In other words, banks can be made resolvable, and “too big to fail” can come to an end. To do so, the authorities, banks and...

This paper empirically analyzes the determinants of banks' systemic importance. In constructing a measure on the systemic importance of financial institutions we find that size is a leading determinant. This confirms the usual "Too big to fail'' argument. Nevertheless, banks with size above a...

Currency market intervention-cum-reserve accumulation has emerged as the favored "self-insurance" strategy in recipient countries of excessive private capital inflows. This paper argues that capital account management represents a less costly alternative line of defense deserving renewed...