Emerging countries in many cases are more crisis-prone than highly developed industrialized countries. This is in many cases due to a weak or volatile financial sector. The best policy to strengthen crisis resistance is the building up of a sound financial position. A sound financial position of...

This paper constructs a new measure of currency mismatch in the banking sector that controls for bank lending to unhedged borrowers. This measure explicitly takes into account the indirect exchange rate risk that banks undertake when they lend to borrowers that will not be able to repay in the...

The crisis has affected all European economies, but it has also brought into relief the substantial differentiation across the region. The authors demonstrate that it has put an increased premium on sound macroeconomic and macroprudential policies: economies with lower inflation, smaller current...

We investigate the effects of credit ratings-contingent financial regulation on foreign bank lending behavior. We examine the sensitivity of international bank flows to debtor countries’ sovereign credit rating changes before and after the implementation of the Basel 2 risk-based capital...

Trade finance, particularly in the form of short-term letters of credit has received favourable capital treatment new Basel III rules. However, concerns have been expressed over the potential negative “unintended consequences” of the newly created leverage ratio for trade. This paper offers...

This paper finds that factors determined outside of a country are more closely related to the global bank loans she receives. These loans are more stable when global banks are less competitive and have a higher presence in the recipient country. We obtain our results by using data on the...

Lack of transparency in securitization transactions significantly contributed to the severe financial crisis of 2007–2009. To increase transparency we propose a new mechanism: financial claims with fingerprints. They would allow market participants at each stage of the securitization process...

2003 marks the 40th anniversary of the founding of SUERF. To mark this milestone, some time ago the Council of Management commissioned Professor Jean-Paul Abraham to write a commemorative report. His mandate was not to write a history of SUERF itself (that would be too self-indulgent) but to...

We present a model of optimal intervention in a flight to quality episode. The reason for intervention stems from a collective bias in agents' expectations. Agents in the model make risk management decisions with incomplete knowledge. They understand their own shocks, but are uncertain of how...

In the event of a third generation crisis, international lending of last resort should be used if and only if the ILLOR is informed on the subject of financial and banking domestic markets. Therefore, it will act at a macroeconomic level, as a usual ILLOR, but also at a microeconomic level,...