The emerging project bond market - covenant provisions and credit spreads

The emergence in the 1990s of a nascent project bond market to fund long-term infrastructure projects in developing countries merits attention. The authors compile detailed information on a sample of 105 bonds issued between January 1993 and March 2002 for financing infrastructure projects in developing countries, document their contractual covenants, and analyze their pricing determinants. They find that on average, project bonds are issued at approximately 300 basis points above U.S. Treasury securities, have a surprisingly high issue size of US$278 million, a maturity of slightly under 12 years, and are rated slightly below investment grade. In terms of geographic origin, projects in Asia and Latin America have issued more bonds than those located in other regions. Much of the recent work relating to the role of contractual covenants to the determination of bond prices has focused on the U.S. corporate bond market with its unique bankruptcy code - Chapter 11 - and well developed legal framework, recognizing the bond contract as the sole instrument of defining the rights and duties of various parties. In circumstances in which the underpinning legal and institutional frameworks governing contract formation and enforcement are not well developed, the link between bond pricing and legal framework becomes important. This finding is confirmed by the authors'econometric analysis of project bond pricing model. So, investors take into account the quality of the host country's legal framework and reward projects located in countries that adhere to the rule of law with tighter credit spreads and lower funding costs.Banks&Banking Reform,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Financial Intermediation,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Banks&Banking Reform,Housing Finance,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Economic Theory&Research,Financial Intermediation

Financial Spillovers to Emerging Markets during the Global Financial Crisis

Using data from the recent crisis, the authors analyze financial linkages between market liquidity and bank solvency measures in advanced economies and emerging market bond and stock markets. A multivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model is estimated to gauge the extent of co-movements of these financial variables across markets. The findings indicate that the notion of possible decoupling of financial markets had been misplaced. In fact, interlinkages between funding stress and equity markets in advanced economies and emerging market financial indicators were highly correlated, and have seen sharp increases during specific crisis moments.emerging markets, subprime crisis, liquidity, solvency, GARCHemerging markets, subprime crisis, liquidity, solvency, GARCH

Impact of the US Credit Crunch and Housing Market Crisis on China

There are many similarities between the US, the UK and the Chinese housing markets, including the movements of interest rates and house prices. Some Chinese banks, especially the Bank of China, have been exposed to the US mortgage securitization market. These have triggered a serious concern as to whether the US credit crunch and housing market crisis may be replicated in China. This paper shows that there are some significant differences between China and the West, especially the US and the UK. Compared with the US and other western industrialized economies, the booming house market in China has been supported by fast economic growth, rapid urbanization and high domestic savings. In addition, Chinese banks are less exposed to mortgage defaults than their western counterparts because house buyers are mainly urban and high income residents who are required to have high down payments. These Sino-Western economic and social differences suggest that the US credit crunch and housing market crisis may have some negative impacts on Chinese commercial banks and the overall economy but are unlikely to cause a similar financial and housing crisis in China despite the current struggling Chinese stock markets and a slowdown of house price growth.US credit crunch, housing market crisis, China

Monetary policy report to the Congress

The economic expansion in the United States became increasingly well established in the first half of 2004, but the pace of inflation picked up from its very low rate in 2003. At the time of the February Monetary Policy Report to the Congress, considerable evidence suggested that the U.S. economy had moved into a period of more-vigorous expansion. Nonetheless, some businesses remained cautious about hiring and investment. In the event, businesses stepped up their hiring in the spring, and capital spending seems to have continued apace.> Over the first half of this year, energy prices soared, and inflation in core consumer prices increased. To some extent, the upturn in core inflation reflected the indirect effects of higher energy prices. In addition, strengthening aggregate demand worldwide induced a surge in the prices of many primary commodities and industrial materials, and the decline in the dollar in 2003 put upward pressure on import prices. In this environment, firms were better able to pass on the higher costs of imports, raise the prices of domestically produced items that compete with imports, and in many cases boost their profit margins.> Monetary policy was very accommodative at the start of 2004 as the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) sought to provide continuing support to the economic expansion. Following some upbeat labor market reports, solid growth in output, and a pickup in core consumer price inflation, the FOMC announced at its May meeting that it believed that the monetary policy accommodation then in place could be "removed at a pace that is likely to be measured." At its June meeting, the FOMC decided to begin moving the federal funds rate back toward a more neutral setting.> Although some of the recent data have been on the soft side, the available information on the outlook for the U.S. economy is, on balance, positive. The prospects also seem favorable for inflation to remain contained in the period ahead.Monetary policy - United States ; Economic conditions - United States

Monetary policy report to the Congress

The economic expansion in the United States gathered strength during 2003 while price inflation remained quite low. At the beginning of the year, uncertainties about the economic outlook and about the prospects of war in Iraq apparently weighed on spending decisions and extended the period of subpar economic performance that had begun more than two years earlier. Over the second half of the year, in the absence of new shocks to economic activity and with gathering confidence in the durability of the economic expansion, the stimulus from monetary and fiscal policies showed through more readily in an improvement in domestic demand. Spurred by the global recovery in the high-tech sector and by a pickup in economic activity abroad, U.S. exports also posted solid increases in the second half of the year. ; Still, slack in resource utilization remained substantial, unit labor costs continued to decline as productivity surged, and core inflation moved lower. The performance of the economy last year further bolstered the case that the faster rate of increase in productivity, which began to emerge in the late 1990s, would persist. The combination of that favorable productivity trend and stimulative macroeconomic policies is likely to sustain robust economic expansion and low inflation in 2004.Monetary policy - United States ; Economic conditions - United States

Monetary policy report to the Congress

Monetary policy - United States ; Economic conditions - United States

"Money Manager Capitalism and the Global Financial Crisis"

This paper applies Hyman Minsky's approach to provide an analysis of the causes of the global financial crisis. Rather than finding the origins in recent developments, this paper links the crisis to the long-term transformation of the economy from a robust financial structure in the 1950s to the fragile one that existed at the beginning of this crisis in 2007. As Minsky said, "Stability is destabilizing": the relative stability of the economy in the early postwar period encouraged this transformation of the economy. Today's crisis is rooted in what he called "money manager capitalism," the current stage of capitalism dominated by highly leveraged funds seeking maximum returns in an environment that systematically under-prices risk. With little regulation or supervision of financial institutions, money managers have concocted increasingly esoteric instruments that quickly spread around the world. Those playing along are rewarded with high returns because highly leveraged funding drives up prices for the underlying assets. Since each subsequent bust wipes out only a portion of the managed money, a new boom inevitably rises. Perhaps this will prove to be the end of this stage of capitalism--the money manager phase. Of course, it is too early even to speculate on the form capitalism will take. I will only briefly outline some policy implications.

Why Doesn't Asia Have Bigger Bond Markets?

Asia's underdeveloped bond markets and dependence on bank finance have been topics of concern since the crisis of 1997-8. In this paper we document that the slow development of Asian bond markets is a phenomenon with multiple dimensions. Larger country size, stronger institutions, less volatile exchange rates, and more competitive banking sectors tend to be positively associated with bond market capitalization. Asian countries' strong fiscal balances, while admirable on other grounds, have not been conducive to the growth of government bond markets. The results suggest that the region's structural characteristics and macroeconomic and financial policies account fully for differences in bond market development between Asia and the rest of the world. Once one controls for these characteristics and policies, in other words, there is no residual Asia effect.'

The Case of the Missing Market: The Bond Market and Why It Matters for Financial Development

Over the last decade interest in the role of finance in economic growth has revived. Building from the pioneering work of Goldsmith (1965) and the insights of Shaw (1973) and McKinnon (1973), the more recent work examines the role of financial institutions and financial markets in corporate governance and the consequent implications for economic growth and development. Levine (1997) and Stulz (2000) have provided excellent reviews of this literature and Allen and Gale (2000) have extended it by developing a framework for comparing bank-based financial systems with market-based financial systems. Although the literature addresses "capital markets," on closer inspection the main focus is really equity markets. Bond markets are almost completely overlooked. Although the omission of the bond market is not defended in the literature, one could argue that it does little violence to reality. As Table 1 shows, in most emerging economies in Asia, bond markets are very small relative to the banking system or equity markets. Moreover, the most striking theoretical results flow from a comparison of debt contracts with equity contracts and at a high level of abstraction bank lending can proxy for all debt. In any event, data are much more readily available for equity markets and the banking system than for bond markets, even in the United States.