Banks’ liquidity holdings are comfortably above legal or prudential requirements in most Central American countries. While good for financial stability, high systemic liquidity may nonetheless hinder monetary policy transmission and financial markets development. Using a panel of about...

The 1988 Basel I Accord set the common requirements of bank capital to promote the soundness and stability of the international banking system. The agreement required banks to hold capital in proportion to their perceived credit risks, and this requirement may have caused a “credit crunch,”...

Over the past decade policy makers in Latin America have adopted a number of macroprudential instruments to manage the procyclicality of bank credit dynamics to the private sector and contain systemic risk. Reserve requirements, in particular, have been actively employed. Despite their...

This paper proposes and demonstrates a methodology for modeling correlated systemic solvency and liquidity risks for a banking system. Using a forward looking simulation of many risk factors applied to detailed balance sheets for a 10 bank stylized United States banking system, we analyze...

The Asian financial crisis marked the beginning of worldwide efforts to improve the effectiveness of financial supervision. However, the crisis that started in 2007?08 was a crude awakening: several of these improvements seemed unable to avoid or mitigate the crisis. This paper brings the first...

Recent financial sector crises and their resolution have raised new issues and provided additional experiences to draw on in the future. Banking sector problems in Russia, Turkey, and a few Latin American countries occurred within the context of highly dollarized economies, high levels of...

The financial turmoil of the late 1990s prompted a broad search for tools and techniques for detecting and preventing financial crises, and more recent episodes of instability have high lighted the importance of continuous monitoring of financial systems as a tool for preventing crises. This...

This paper discusses key findings of the Financial System Stability Assessment on Banking Supervision, Insurance Supervison, Securities Regulation, and Anti-Money Laundering and Combating the Financing of Terrorism for Greece. The Greek financial sector appears largely sound and resilient to...

This 2004 Article IV Consultation highlights that six years after the 1998 financial crisis, Ukraine continues to recover strongly. In 2003, real GDP grew by 9.4 percent, despite a poor harvest, and reached 13.5 percent through July 2004. Growth in 2003–04 has been prompted by favorable...