The BIS consolidated banking statistics have been expanded to better capture banks' country risk exposures. The expanded statistics provide for the first time information about banks' derivatives and contingent exposures, as well as additional details about the reallocation of risk exposures.

The depth and breadth of money markets in Asia have improved significantly over the past decade, yet many are still characterised by segmentation and a low degree of cross-border integration. Admittedly, the underdevelopment of Asia’s money markets worked to the region’s advantage during the...

In recent years efforts have been made to deepen financial links between emerging markets within individual regions. Such regional financial integration lags the integration of emerging markets with global markets, but authorities in Asia in particular are taking steps to accelerate the process.

Privatization -- the transfer of activities from the public to the private sector -- gained international prominence in the 1980s because of the need to reduce budget deficits and growing concerns about the efficiency of state-owned enterprises and government bureaucracies. This article examines...

This article examines the changes that have occurred in the composition of funds raised by provincial borrowers during the 1990s. Higher financing requirements, coupled with the declining availability of funds from non-market sources such as the Canada Pension Plan, led provincial governments...

It is widely acknowledged that the recent generation of DSGE models failed to incorporate many of the liquidity and financial accelerator mechanisms revealed in the global financial crisis that began in 2007. This paper complements the papers presented at the 2009 BIS annual conference focused...

Is there any need to “clean” up a banking system in the midst of a crisis, by closing or recapitalizing weak banks and taking bad assets off bank balance sheets, or can one wait till the crisis is over? We argue that an “overhang” of impaired banks that may be forced to sell assets soon...

Securitization was meant to disperse credit risk to those who were better able to bear it. In practice, securitization appears to have concentrated the risks in the financial intermediary sector itself. This paper outlines an accounting framework for the financial system for assessing the impact...

The recent crisis was characterized by massive illiquidity. This paper reviews what we know and don't know about illiquidity and all its friends: market freezes, fire sales, contagion, and ultimately insolvencies and bailouts. It first explains why liquidity cannot easily be apprehended through...

I explain the key failure mechanics of large dealer banks, and some policy implications. This is not a review of the financial crisis of 2007–2009. Systemic risk is considered only in passing. Both the financial crisis and the systemic...