Macro-financial linkages and bank behaviour: evidence from the second-round effects of the global financial crisis on East Asia

This paper studies the link between macro-financial variability and bank behaviour, which justifies the second-round effects of the global financial crisis on East Asia. Following Gallego et al. (The impact of the global economic and financial crisis on Central Eastern and South Eastern Europe (CESEE) and Latin America, 2010), the second round effects are defined as the adverse feedback loop from the slumps in economic activities and sharp financial market deterioration, which may influence the financial performance of bank, inter alia via deteriorating credit quality, declining profitability and increasing problems in retaining necessary capitalization. Differentiating itself from other research, this study stresses adjustments in four dimensions of bank performance and behaviour: asset quality, profitability, capital adequacy, and lending behaviour, assuming that any change in a bank-specific characteristic is induced by endogenous adjustments of the others. The empirical results based on partial adjustment models and two-step system GMM estimation show that bank’s adjustment behaviour is subject to the variation in the macro-financial environment and the stress condition in the global financial market. There is no convincing evidence to support the effectiveness of policy rate cut to boots bank lending and to avoid a financial accelerator effect

Bank level stability factors and consumer confidence – a comparative study of Islamic and conventional banks’ product mix

This study examines the behaviour of key bank level stability factors of liquidity, capital, risk-taking and consumer confidence in Islamic and conventional banks which operate in the same market. Using fixed effect sample of 194 banks of Gulf Cooperating Countries between 2000 and 2007, we found that liquidity is not determined by bank’s product mix but rather attributed to systematic factors. However, non performing assets (representing loans to sub prime borrowers) have positive and significant relationship with liquidity implying that during the crisis, Islamic banks tend to take stringent risk strategies compared to conventional banks. Furthermore, Islamic banks generally tend to provide higher consumer confidence levels as they were more capitalized than conventional banks, although conventional banks had carried higher averages of liquidity compared to Islamic banks. Consumer confidence levels or depositors’ discipline as proxied by deposits and customer funding over liabilities generally appear to be higher in Islamic banks than conventional banks

Global liquidity and commodity prices-a cointegrated VAR approach for OECD countries

This article examines the interactions between money, consumer prices and commodity prices at a global level from 1970 to 2008. Using aggregated data for major Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries and a Cointegrating Vector Autoregression (CVAR) framework, we are able to establish long-run and short-run relationships among these variables while the process is mainly driven by global liquidity. According to our empirical findings, different price elasticities in commodity and consumer goods markets can explain the recently observed overshooting of commodity over consumer prices. Although the sample period is rather long, recursive tests corroborate that our CVAR fits the data very well.