Suchergebnisse

Agency theory is used to evaluate how the European Union (EU) may deal with the resolution of goal and agency conflicts in dealing with failing financial institutions. Experience in the United States suggests that the financial and regulatory structure being put in place, which relies upon country-sponsored deposit insurance funds and home country responsibility for supervision and lender-of-last-resort functions, is not likely to be robust to the failure of a large EU institution that threatens the solvency of the deposit insurance fund or that poses systemic risk. The author concludes that the EU needs a centralized and common approach to dealing with troubled institutions.

This paper examines the implications that alternative regulatory structures may have for resolving failed banking institutions. We place our emphasis on the European Union (EU), which is both economically and financially large and has several features relating to cross-border banking in the form of direct investment that may heighten the problems we consider. We propose four principles to ensure the efficient resolution of bank failures, should they occur, with minimum, if any, credit and liquidity losses. These principles include prompt legal closure of institutions before they become economically insolvent, prompt identification of claims and assignment of losses, prompt reopening of failed institutions, and prompt recapitalizing and reprivatization of failed institutions. Finally, we propose a mechanism to put such a scheme into place quickly in the case where a cross-border banking organization seeks to take advantage of the liberal cross-border branching provisions in the single banking license available to banks in the EU. In return for the privilege of such a license, the bank agrees to be subject to a legal closure rule as a positive capital ratio established by the EU or the home country.

The debate over modernizing the financial structure is raising questions about the merits of modernizing the financial regulatory structure. Regulatory structure is important because an almost unavoidable feature of our current system of government is that Congress assigns multiple goals that sometimes have conflicting policy implications to the regulatory agencies. The structure of the agencies is important to the resolution of these conflicts. Responsibility for two or more goals that have conflicting implications may be assigned to a single agency that is likely to resolve the conflict with a consistent set of policies based on the agency's priorities. Alternatively, the goals may be assigned to more than one agency, an action that often results in the conflicts being debated in the public arena but that may also result in the agencies' implementing inconsistent policies. This paper uses the problem of goal conflicts to provide a framework for evaluating alternative regulatory structures.

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to examine the events leading up to the Great Recession, the US Federal Reserve's response to what it perceived to be a short-term liquidity problem, and the programs it put in place to address liquidity needs from 2007 through the third quarter of 2008.


Design/methodology/approach
– These programs were designed to channel liquidity to some of the largest institutions, most of which were primary dealers. We describe these programs, examine available evidence regarding their effectiveness and detail which institutions received the largest amounts under each program.


Findings
– We argue that increasing financial fragility and potential insolvencies in several major institutions were evident prior to the crisis. While it is inherently difficult to disentangle issues of illiquidity from issues of insolvency, failure to recognize and address those insolvency problems delayed necessary adjustments, undermined confidence in the financial system and may have exacerbated the crisis.


Research limitations/implications
– Disentangling issues of illiquidity from issues of insolvency is inherently difficult and so it is not possible to specify a definitive counterfactual scenario. Nonetheless, failure to recognize and address the insolvency problems in several major institutions until more than a year after the crisis had begun delayed the necessary adjustment and undermined confidence in the financial system.


Originality/value
– This paper is among the first to analyze data showing the amounts of lending and the distribution of these loans across institutions under the Fed's special liquidity facilities during the first 18 months of the financial crisis.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government-sponsored enterprises that are central players in U.S. secondary mortgage markets. Over the past decade, these institutions have amassed enormous mortgage- and non-mortgage-oriented investment portfolios that pose significant interest-rate risks to the companies and a systemic risk to the financial system. This paper describes the nature of these risks and systemic concerns and then evaluates several policy options for reducing the institutions' investment portfolios. We conclude that limits on portfolio size (assets or liabilities) would be the most desirable approach to mitigating the systemic risk posed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.