Central Bank Borrowing Research Articles

Central bank screening, moral hazard, and the lender of last resort policy

This paper constructs a theoretical model to examine the LOLR policy when a central bank can imperfectly screen insolvent from solvent banks. We find that: (1) Central bank screening produces a “positive” stigma associated with central bank borrowing by punishing insolvent banks. (2) With central bank screening, the LOLR policy in fact reduces moral hazard rather than inducing it. (3) If the central bank can better identify solvent and insolvent banks when they apply for central bank loans, it will improve social welfare first by forcing the insolvent banks to efficiently liquidate their assets and second by deterring banks from choosing the risky assets to start with.

Are Fiscal Deficits Really Inflationary? An Investigation Into Ethiopia’s Experience

Abstract This study establishes long-run relations between budget deficits and inflation, while controlling for money supply owing to the justified links between deficits and money supply especially for developing countries. We employed time series data with temporal coverage of 1980-2018. Augmented Dickey Fuller has tested nonstationary for all series, but with all stationary at first difference. The Engle-Granger (1981) methodology for Cointegration tested long-run relation between budget deficits, money supply and inflation. Due to Laney and Willet (1983), the conventional least squares regression was adopted to estimate parameters of long-run equation. The results evidenced that fiscal deficits and money supply have been at the root of galloping inflation in Ethiopia. Besides, budget deficits have been the root cause of money supply growth in Ethiopia; while giving empirical support to the hypothesis that, governments of least developed countries resort to monetize large portion of their deficits. There is a need to reform the fiscal aspect of the government, if the mounting rate of deficits has to be lessened. Budgetary imbalances can be rectified through enhancement of domestic capital market and setting limits on central bank borrowing. Besides, it could be vital to expand the tax base as well as intensify efficiency of the existing tax system in the country.

Fiscal Deficit and Its Less Inflationary Sources of Borrowing with the Moderating Role of Political Instability: Evidence from Malaysia

Theoretically, fiscal deficit may be inflationary, but its sources of financing can bring change in significance and impact. Malaysia is facing a high tendency of fiscal deficit from the last decade. To finance the fiscal deficit, which sources are less inflationary in the country? To answer this question, the study aims to analyze the quarterly financial time-series data covering the period from 2000 Q1 to 2018 Q4 of Malaysia using recent econometric techniques. The analysis is carried out in three stages. In the first stage, it is tested that the fiscal deficit is inflationary along with the money supply. In the second stage, it is determined that political instability moderates the link between inflation and the fiscal deficit and the external sources of borrowing in the short-run, while the domestic sources of borrowing in the long run are found inflationary. In the third stage, the central bank borrowing and Bank institutions borrowing from the domestic sources and the short-term borrowing from the external sources are found less inflationary. The findings suggest that borrowing through the central bank and bank institutions (domestic sources) is less inflationary in the long term; while for a short-term policy, from external sources, only short-term borrowing is less inflationary; medium- and long-term borrowing are much more sensitive to inflation.

Credit Supply: Are There Negative Spillovers from Banks’ Proprietary Trading?

Following the 2008 financial crisis, policy makers considered regulations that restrict banks’ activities which were motivated by concerns that banks use central bank borrowing, government guarantees, or subsidies to fund securities trading instead of lending to the real economy. Using a global sample of 132 major banks from 2003 to 2016, we find that banks’ securities trading is indeed associated with decreased loan supply. Effects are stronger for domestic lending markets, during crisis periods, and in countries with deeper financial markets. However, corporate capital expenditures and employment growth are unaffected, suggesting that policy makers’ concerns are only partly justified.

Reserve Accumulation and Bank Lending: Evidence from Korea

Reserve accumulation is funded by the central bank's domestic borrowing as it always sterilizes reserve purchases by increasing domestic liabilities. The central bank borrowing could crowd out firms' borrowing under imperfect international capital mobility. I present a model that illustrates the mechanism and examine monthly balance sheets of Korean banks from September 2003 to August 2008 to find that bank lending to firms did decline after reserve accumulation. Controlling for individual effects and time effects, it is estimated that bank lending declined by 50 cents after one additional dollar of reserve accumulation. A causal relationship is verified by differences-in-differences identification. After one standard deviation reserve accumulation shock, primary dealer banks and foreign bank branches cut lending growth by 0.4 and 1.6 percentage points more than non-primary dealer banks and domestic banks, respectively.

Can the Provision of Long-Term Liquidity Help to Avoid a Credit Crunch? Evidence from the Eurosystem's LTROs

We exploit the Eurosystem’s longer-term refinancing operations (LTROs) of 2011-2012 to analyze the effects that a large provision of central bank liquidity to banks has on the credit supply to firms. We control for credit demand by examining firms that borrow from several banks, in addition to controlling for banks’ risk. We find that LTROs enhanced loan supply in France. Nevertheless, the transmission took place mostly with the first operation of December 2011, in which constrained banks bid more, and larger borrowers benefited more. The opportunity to substitute long-term central bank borrowing for short-term borrowing was instrumental in this transmission.

Shadow Banking and the Limits of Central Bank Liquidity Support: How to Achieve a Better Balance between Global and Official Liquidity

Global liquidity provision is highly procyclical. The recent financial crisis has resulted in a flight to safety, with severe strains in key funding markets leading central banks to employ highly unconventional policies to avoid a systemic meltdown. Bagehot’s advice to “lend freely at high rates against good collateral” has been stretched to the limit in order to meet the liquidity needs of dysfunctional financial markets. As the eligibility criteria for central bank borrowing have been tweaked, it is legitimate to ask, How elastic should the supply of central bank currency be?Even when the central bank has the ability to create abundant official liquidity, there should be some limits to its support for the financial sector. Traditionally, the misuse of the fiat money privilege has been limited by self-imposed rules that central bank loans must be fully backed by gold or collateralized in some other way. But since the onset of the crisis, we have seen how this constraint has been relaxed to accommodate the demand for market support. My suggestion is that there has to be some upper limit, and that we should work hard to find guidelines and policies that can limit the need for central bank liquidity support in future crises. In this paper, I review the recent expansion of central bank liquidity support during the crisis, before discussing the collateral polices related to central banks’ lender-of-last-resort and market-maker-of-last-resort policies and their rationale. I then examine the relationship between the central bank and the treasury, and the potential threat to central bank independence if they venture into too much risky balance sheet expansion. A discussion about the exceptional growth of the shadow banking system follows. I introduce the concept of “liquidity illusion” to describe the fragility upon which much of the sector is based, and note that market growth has been based largely on a “fair-weather” view that central banks will support the market on rainy days.I argue that we need a better theoretical framework to understand the growth in the shadow banking system and the role of central banks in providing liquidity in a crisis.Recently, the concept of “endogenous finance” has been used to explain the strong procyclical tendencies of the global financial system. I show that this concept was central to Hyman P. Minsky’s theory of financial instability, and suggest that his insights should be integrated into the ongoing search for a better theoretical framework for understanding the growth of the shadow banking system and how we can limit official liquidity support for this system. I end the paper with a summary and a discussion of some of the policy issues. I note that the Basel III “package” will hopefully reduce the need for central bank liquidity support in the future, but suggest that further structural reforms of the financial sector are needed to ease the tension between freewheeling private credit expansion and the limited ability or willingness of central banks to provide unlimited official liquidity support in a future crisis.

The People's Republic of China: Rapid growth and the risk of economic instability

At the People's Congress this March, the Chinese leadership restated its commitment to continue with, and accelerate the economic reform programme. Several important steps along the road to reform have already been taken. At the same time, a number of domestic and foreign-trade developments call for important decisions to be made: China will only escape from the cycle of inflationary expansion and subsequent contraction of economic activity if the taxation system and enterprise management and administration — including a clear definition of ownership and managerial rights — are restructured. Only when public revenue is at a high and constant level and an effective capital market is in operation will the state be in a position to realise its ambitious investment programme without recourse to central-bank borrowing and thus without continually creating an inflationary potential. The support of a broad majority of the population, who are increasingly keen to participate in determining the course of economic policy, will also be required if the reforms are to succeed.

Fiscal Deficits, Exchange Rate Crises and Inflation

This paper extends earlier work on unsustainable monetary policies by endogenizing the regime switch that ultimately restores sustainability. Within this framework we analyse exchange rate based stabilization programmes and show how constraints on Central Bank borrowing during an exchange crisis influence timing and nature of the post-collapse equilibrium. Such constraints introduce non-neutralities; more restrictive pre-collapse credit policies increase the post-collapse inflation rate. External shocks can destroy consistency between fiscal programmes and inflation targets, causing reserve losses, exchange rate changes and higher inflation. Balance of Payments crises are the mechanism through which fiscal imbalances translate into higher inflation rather than an alternative explanation of it.

On Disequilibrium Effects of Interest Rate Controls in a Monopolistic Banking System

In the partial equilibrium framework of a monopolistic banking system, this paper seeks to analyze the disequilibrium and welfare effects of certain interest rate controls. The outcome is that the policy mix of raising the loan and discount rates, along with the institutional practice of tying the deposit rate positively to the policy mix, (a) will decrease lending to unrationed borrowers, increase it to rationed borrowers and thus leave the effect on aggregate lending ambiguous, (b) may shift some rationed borrowers to unrationed status, thereby decreasing credit rationing, and (c) will make unrationed borrowers worse off, depositors better off and leave the welfare status of rationed borrowers uncertain. On the other hand, the policy of changing central bank borrowing terms works-in a disequilibrium contextonly via availability effects; (a*) it will have no effect on unrationed borrowers and depositors, while raising central bank borrowing terms, (b*) will decrease lending to rationed borrowers, thereby decreasing aggregate lending and increasing credit rationing; consequently rationed borrowers become worse off.