Lender Of Last Resort Research Articles

Systemic Risk and Monetary Policy: The Haircut Gap Channel of the Lender of Last Resort

Abstract We show that lender of last resort (LOLR) policy exacerbates bank interconnectedness. Using novel micro-level data, we analyze LOLR’s haircut gaps: the differences between the private market and central bank haircuts. LOLR policy incentivizes banks to increase pledging and holdings of higher haircut-gap bonds, especially those issued by domestic and systemically important banks. Effects only apply to banks, not to nonbanks without LOLR access. LOLR funding revives bank bond issuance associated with higher haircut gaps and increases the subsequent correlation between pledging and issuing banks’ bond prices, in particular during periods of low-market returns and for domestic, systemically important banks.

Strengthening the Managerial Roles of Bank Indonesia as a Lender of Last Resort in Facing National Economic Uncertainty

Indonesia is currently in uncertainty regarding national economic development. The government has taken various preparatory steps to prevent negative impacts on the national economy. However, these efforts still need to be supported by law to provide certainty for policymakers in carrying out their duties and authorities, including Bank Indonesia (BI) as Lender of Last Resort (LoLR). This research explores, discovers, and analyzes legal issues related to BI's role as LoLR in overcoming the economic crisis. Methodologically, this analysis uses normative legal research methods with a conceptual approach and a statutory approach in building its arguments. The findings show the need to strengthen legal certainty regarding BI's authority as LoLR. This includes a Government Regulation instead of Law followed up by issuing a Joint Decree between the Minister of Finance, BI, and Law Enforcement Institutions.

The Sovereign Lender of Last Resort Role of the ECB: Rules, Choice, and Time

AbstractThis article argues that the European Central Bank (ECB), supported by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), can be perceived to have functionally softened the no sovereign lender of last resort (LOLR) rule originally implied by Articles 123 and 125 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) towards a rule-with-exceptions and, increasingly, towards a presumption: The ECB will act as sovereign LOLR to a constituent Member unless and until that Member is insolvent or unwilling to cooperate with measures designed to restore market confidence. This functional moderation of a rule, from an ex ante specification of an outcome towards the exercise of greater choice at the point of application, carries with it contentious normative questions. To motivate discussion thereof beyond a largely ahistorical, non-indexical, rules versus discretion debate, the rules of the currency union are located within the genealogy of international exchange rate regimes. The “convertibility” rule of the gold standard and the “parity” rule of the Bretton Woods system are contrasted with their Eurozone equivalent. A consequentialist standpoint is sketched out from which the interventions of the ECB, in light of their available alternatives, appear broadly consistent with welfarist cost-benefit analysis and less normatively worrisome than by reference to evaluative criteria that emphasize a narrowly rule-bound conception of the rule of law.

ПЪРВИТЕ СТЪПКИ НА КРЕДИТОРА ОТ ПОСЛЕДНА ИНСТАНЦИЯ В БЪЛГАРИЯ. ИСТОРИЯ И ДЕБАТИ В ГОДИНИТЕ НА ВЕЛИКАТА ДЕПРЕСИЯ

In recent years we have witnessed profound institutional changes in the character of central banks and in their monetary policies. These transformations are the result of a number of factors, most notably the crisis that began in 2008, as well as the large-scale processes of digitalisation of money. The place and specific mechanisms of the financial stability system, including of the lender of last resort (LOLR), are also evolving. In this context a review of the historic development of the LOLR could be particularly useful. This article aims to present the first steps of the LOLR in Bulgaria in the years of the Great Depression and the banking crises related to it. The various institutional forms of the LOLR in Bulgaria are described in sequence. The role of the Bulgarian National Bank (BNB), as the LOLR in the systemic crisis and the rescuing of Credit Bank in 1931, and the theoretical discussions among Bulgarian economists about the LOLR have been examined

Federal reserve intervention and systemic risk during financial crises

I examine the relation between Federal Reserve emergency actions and aggregate U.S. systemic risk during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and the COVID-19 crisis. I divide these actions in to three categories: lender of last resort (LLR), liquidity provision, and open market operations (OMO). Evidence suggests that during the GFC, liquidity provision and OMO was related* to reduced systemic risk, while evidence on LLR actions is mixed. Further, I find that Federal Reserve actions were related to increased stability in other G8 financial systems during the GFC, and that after the GFC, facilities that remained operational were no longer related to aggregate systemic risk. I do not find a relation between Federal Reserve actions and systemic risk during the COVID-19 crisis. Together, these findings can inform actions and policy decisions in future financial crises.

Funding money-creating banks: Cash funding, balance sheet funding and the moral hazard of currency elasticity

Once banks are viewed as money creators rather than financial intermediaries, a distinction between their cash funding and balance sheet funding can be made. This distinction opens up various insights. It allows for a fuller explanation of the cash needs of banks with reference to the pattern of their cash gains and losses. It facilitates an understanding of the central bank as not only a cash lender of last resort (LOLR) for some banks some of the time, but also as a cash lender of continual and only resort (LOCOR) for all banks all of the time. It leads to novel insights into the sources of banks' balance sheet funding. The paper investigates the various implications of the central bank's elastic currency policy in its role as LOCOR, particularly how it thereby incites considerably more moral hazard than conventionally acknowledged. This realisation opens up a better understanding of the banking sector's proneness to excess and the economy's susceptibility to financial cycles. The paper concludes by weighing the merits of the only two policy strategies by which banking excess can be checked.

Systemic Risk and Monetary Policy: The Haircut Gap Channel of the Lender of Last Resort

We show that lender of the last resort (LOLR) policy contributes to higher bank interconnectedness and systemic risk. Using novel micro-level data, we analyze the haircut gap channel of LOLR – the difference between the private market and central bank haircuts. LOLR increases interconnectedness by incentivizing banks to pledge higher haircut gap bonds, especially issued by similar banks and by systemically important banks. LOLR also exacerbates cross-pledging of bank bonds. Higher haircut gaps only incentivize banks, not other intermediaries without LOLR access, to increase bank bond holdings. Finally, LOLR revives bank bond issuance associated with higher haircut gaps.

Policy Uncertainty, Lender of Last Resort and the Real Economy

We show that a reduction in lender of last resort (LOLR) policy uncertainty positively affects bank lending and propagates to investment and employment. We exploit a unique policy that reduced uncertainty regarding the availability of future LOLR funding for banks as a quasi-natural experiment. Using micro-level data on banks, firms and loans in Portugal, we generate cross-sectional variation in banks’ exposure to uncertainty and find that the size of the haircut subsidy - the gap between private market and central bank security valuations - plays a key role in the propagation of the shock to lending and the real economy. JEL Classification: E44, E52, E58, G21, G32

Policy uncertainty, lender of last resort and the real economy

A reduction in lender of last resort (LOLR) policy uncertainty positively affects bank lending and propagates to investment and employment. We exploit a unique policy that reduced uncertainty regarding the availability of future LOLR funding for banks as a quasi-natural experiment. Using micro-level data on banks, firms and loans in Portugal, we generate cross-sectional variation in banks’ exposure to uncertainty and find that the size of the haircut subsidy - the gap between private market and central bank security valuations - plays a key role in the propagation of the shock to lending and the real economy.

Shadow Banking and the Four Pillars of Traditional Financial Intermediation

Abstract Traditional banking is built on four pillars: small and medium enterprise lending, insured deposit taking, access to lender of last resort (LOLR), and prudential supervision. This article unveils the logic of the quadrilogy by showing that it emerges naturally as an equilibrium outcome in a game between banks and the government. A key insight is that regulation and public insurance services (LOLR, deposit insurance) are complementary. The model also shows how prudential regulation must adjust to the emergence of shadow banking and rationalizes structural remedies to counter bogus liquidity hoarding and financial contagion: ring-fencing between regulated and shadow banking and the sharing of liquidity in centralized platforms.

The Fed in the Corporate Bond Market in 2020

The Federal Reserve interventions in private securities markets in the spring of 2020 extended its 2008 playbook from buying high quality short-term paper to bonds, and departed from it by buying junk bonds. In March 2020, the Fed reprised its last-resort lending to primary dealers, accepting private securities as collateral, and its last-resort underwriting and buying of commercial paper. Given the reliance of non-financial firms on corporate bonds, some were not surprised when the Fed then extended last-resort underwriting and buying to corporate bonds. In April, however, the Fed departed from its playbook with its announcement that it would buy junk bond exchange-traded funds (ETFs): it set no minimum quality criterion for its credit extension. The Fed’s announced intervention in corporate bond markets succeeded before the buying even started. It raised prices of corporate bonds, narrowed both trading and fund valuation spreads, reversed investor runs and encouraged record-setting corporate bond issuance. ETF prices jumped on announcement, flipping a flashing market “billboard” from sell to buy, and underlying bond prices, spreads and flows subsequently improved across a broad range of dollar credit markets. This paper raises two policy questions. First, could the Fed have reduced the conflict between buying junk bonds and its previous efforts to reduce supervised banks’ involvement in leveraged loans? The Fed could have bought only junk bond funds holding a smaller weight of the lowest quality bonds issued by firms that private equity deals had leveraged up. Second, should the Congress authorize the Fed to do open market operations in corporate bonds? Such authority could avoid the legal awkwardness of using emergency lending powers to buy corporate bonds and could allow the Fed to develop operational capacity in this important market. Similar issues of role conflict and legal powers arise in any market, including emerging markets, when the central bank buys private securities.

Liquidity from Two Lending Facilities

During financial crises, the lender of last resort (LOLR) uses lending facilities to inject critical funding into the banking sector. The facilities need to be designed in such a way that banks are not reluctant to seek assistance due to stigma and that banks with liquidity concerns are attracted rather than those prone to risk-taking and moral hazard incentives. We use an unexpected disclosure that introduced stigma at one of two similar LOLRs during the Great Depression to evaluate whether banks used LOLR assistance to improve their liquidity needs using a novel trivariate model with recursive endogeneity. We find evidence that banks that approached the facility with stigma were less liquid and reduced their position of safe assets in comparison with banks that approached the facility with no stigma. Thus, stigma forced the pool of LOLR borrowers to separate into different groups of banks that ex-post revealed their liquidity preferences. This finding sheds light on why and when banks approach their LOLR.

Threadneedle street meets Lombard street: Bagehot and central bankers in the aftermath of the great recession

The paper concerns the reception among central bankers of Bagehot’s ideas on the lender of last resort (LLR). For the period 1999–2017 we construct a database of speeches by G7 central bankers that mention Bagehot. On the basis of this database, we show that there was a boom in mentions of Bagehot during the recent financial crisis. Using the Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) codes, we indicate that this increase in the references to Bagehot among central bankers mainly relates to the idea of the LLR, and specifically the so-called Bagehot rules. However, a variety of interpretations of these rules can be observed among central bankers. We argue that these differences in interpretation can be explained by the fact that Bagehot’s rules are used by central bankers either to justify, or, on the contrary, to impose limits on the liquidity injections envisaged under the unconventional monetary policies adopted in reaction to the crisis. We conclude that these diverging preferences on liquidity injections among central bankers allow us to distinguish two main “types” of receptions of Bagehot’s rules: liberal versus conservative.

Do Indonesian Islamic Microfinance Institutions Need Lender of the Last Resort?

Liquidity risk is one of significant risk managed by financial intermediaries including Islamic Microfinance Institutions (IMFIs). The financial intermediaries accept short-term deposits and disburse these deposits in the form of long-term loans. This situation makes IMFI desperately need a lender of last resort (LOLR). Nevertheless, there has been no formal LOLR for Indonesian IMFIs. This study intends to construct the LOLR model for IMFI in Indonesia. This qualitative study applies a case study analysis. This study's subjects are IMFIs in East Java Province that was selected purposively with thirty managers as the key informants. Research findings show that the best model of LOLR is developing a secondary cooperative since the majority form of IMFIs in Indonesia are cooperative entities. With all members of a secondary cooperative deposit for reserve requirements, they can place excess liquidity in the secondary cooperative and ask for financial support.

Taking Europe seriously: European financialization and US monetary power

This article considers the link between the financialization of European banks and US monetary power. We focus first on the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09 (GFC), arguing that crisis origins should largely be located in European banks’ financialization and their becoming a banker to both the US and the global US dollar-based offshore banking system. The interdependence between this system and the US economy constrained US monetary policy before the crisis, and forced the Federal Reserve to assume the Lender of Last Resort (LOLR) function for the entire offshore system, despite much of this system involving lending between non-US counterparties. European financialization caused reduced US monetary autonomy and therefore power. This article argues for greater attention in IPE to European financial developments in the GFC’s implications. The importance of European banking has been maintained post-crisis and Europe has moved to a substantial surplus position, suggesting Europe’s continued importance.

Qard-al-Hasan-based monetary policy and the role of the central bank as the lender of last resort

PurposeThis paper aims to examine how a central bank (CB) can act as a lender of last resort (LOLR) for both Islamic and conventional interest-based banks by pursuing a Qard-al-Hasan (QH)-based monetary policy (MP).Design/methodology/approachThe role of the CB as LOLR under QH-based MP and its effects on major macroeconomic variables, including deposits, loan creation and aggregate expenditures, are examined on theoretical grounds by using the aggregate output and aggregate expenditure model under the framework of Islamic MP.FindingsWhen the CB acts as LOLR by pursuing QH-based MP, it automatically empowers Islamic banks (IBs) by providing access to borrowing funds from the CB on a QH basis. As a result, IBs will not be required to hold billions of dollars as liquid assets against liquidity risks. Thus, the lending capacity of IBs will increase and deposit expansion, loan creation and aggregate expenditures in the economy will all expand. This will in turn increase real GDP and employment while reducing the unemployment rate.Originality/valueThis is the first paper to analyze CBs acting as LOLR for both IBs and conventional interest-based banks by pursuing a QH-based MP, thus providing equal opportunities and equal access to borrowing facilities from the CB, along with equal partnership and fair competition for all and absolutely no discrimination to anyone. The LOLR service to all banks under QH-based MP will unveil a new horizon of opportunities where all financial institutions are expected to thrive. IBs will escape the constraints of the constant fear of liquidity risks and find a level-playing field.

Blockchain Based Smart Sukuk as Shariah Compliant Investment Avenues for Islamic Financial Institutions in Pakistan

The biggest challenge for the Islamic banking industry in Pakistan is the scarcity of Shariah-compliant investment instruments and the absence of a lender of last resort (LOLR) facility for Islamic banks. Due to the problem of surplus liquidity, returns for Islamic banks in Pakistan are lower as compared to the conventional counterparts putting them at a competitive disadvantage with respect to their competitor conventional banks. Sukuk issuance is associated with a high cost of issuance and legal complexity, problems that could be solved by the application of blockchain technology. With the advent of cryptocurrency and developments around blockchain, technology experts, industry professionals along with Shariah scholars have been working to introduce FinTech in Shariah-compliant financing products and services. This research applies a qualitative approach. The study relies on primary data from interviews and secondary data from published sources, academic journals, government and private-sector reports, and public domain including newspaper articles, and websites. Interviews are conducted from blockchain technology experts along with banking \& commerce industry professionals. This study highlights financial instability, lack of financial education and absence of political will being the main reasons for low Sukuk issuance in Pakistan. This study proposes a low-cost smart Sukuk structure to address the liquidity problem of the Islamic banking industry in Pakistan. It is found that smart Sukuk issuance and transaction fees are much lower than the current Sukuk issuances and are expected to be more secure and marketable internationally. Blockchain-based smart Sukuk are practicable to solve the problem of standardization and huge issuance and maintenance cost for the Sukuk industry. The proposed structure could be adopted by governments and organizations to issue Sukuk promising transparent, economical, efficient, and reliable business transactions for both parties.

Central Bank Digital Currency: Benefits and Drawbacks

Prompted by technological advances and a decline in cash usage, many Central Banks are investigating whether it would be possible to issue a digital complement to cash, a so-called Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). Despite ongoing research and occasional pilots, Central Banks have shied away from introducing a CBDC for public use. Even though CBDCs would have the potential to counteract some of the problems that could arise for the payment system in the future when the use of cash is rapidly declining, they also present significant risks for financial stability. This article contributes to the discussion by setting out a CBDC framework and formulating broad design principles for CBDC in line with the central bank´s function as Lender of last Resort (LOLR). The attributes and functionality of a CBDC are highly determinative of the architectural design and technical solution chosen, particularly in the context of LOLR. Therefore, we argue in favour of a solid coin for e-emergency liquidity assistance, available 24 hours a day and seven days per week, anonymous, interest-bearing and unlimited, to prevent bank runs and restore financial stability in times of financial distress.

Banking Panics and the Lender of Last Resort in a Monetary Economy

This paper studies the role of a lender of last resort (LLR) in a monetary model where a shortage of bank’s monetary reserves (or a banking panic) occurs endogenously. We show that while a discount window policy introduced by the LLR is welfare improving, it reduces the banks’ ex ante incentive to hold reserves, which increases the probability of a panic, and causes moral hazard in asset investments. We also examine the combined effect of other related policies such as a penalty in lending rate, liquidity requirements, and constructive ambiguity.

Banking Panics and the Lender of Last Resort in a Monetary Economy

This paper studies the role of a lender of last resort (LLR) in a monetary model where a shortage of bank’s monetary reserves (or a banking panic) occurs endogenously. We show that while a discount window policy introduced by the LLR is welfare improving, it reduces the banks’ ex ante incentive to hold reserves, which increases the probability of a panic, and causes moral hazard in asset investments. We also examine the combined effect of other related policies such as a penalty in lending rate, liquidity requirements, and constructive ambiguity.