While the unfolding financial turmoil has involved new elements, more fundamental elements have remained the same. New elements include structured credit, the originate-to-distribute business model and the tri-party repurchase agreement. The recurrence of crises reflects a basic procyclicality...

This paper models the strategic interaction between a rating agency, a bank and a bank regulator who lacks information about bank asset risk. The regulator can either (1) make bank capital requirements contingent on credit ratings; or (2) set rating-independent capital requirements. Truthful...

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...

The author covers the Northern Rock affair and the subsequent instability in the UK financial system in the context of the history and desired future role of the Bank of England as a central bank. Tim Congdon, a respected monetary economist, shows how the Bank of England failed in its duties to...

This Article considers the scope of the Federal Reserve's emergency loan-making powers and analyzes their use during the recent financial crisis. It argues that many of the Fed's responses to the crisis exceeded the bounds of its statutory authority.In unusual and exigent circumstances, § 13(3)...

When the Federal Reserve first started to pay interest on excess reserves in October 2008, it presented a choice that banks had not previously faced. That is, they could invest bank capital in excess reserves and earn the "better than" risk free rate or they could lend and earn a higher but...

During the subprime crisis, the Federal Reserve introduced several emergency liquidity programs as supplements to the discount window: TAF, PDCF, and TSLF. Using data on loans to large commercial banks and primary dealers, we find that the programs were used by relatively few institutions and...

The failure of Lehman Brothers highlighted the severe lapses in risk management and regulatory oversight that brought on and intensified the global financial crisis. This paper presents a structural credit risk model that provides useful early warning signals that regulators could have used to...

In this paper, I review some selected literature about or related to the monetary neutrality and show that specific aspects of the monetary (non-)neutrality are actually derived from the underlying welfare consideration and thus their validity or desirability depend on the current state and way...

This paper investigates the managing strategies of a bank's liquidity reserve in the broader context of the role of asset-liability management according to the liquidity issues of a banking organisation. Several types of liquidity are presented and how these are interconnected and how they might...