Home country versus cross-border negative externalities in large banking organization failures and how to avoid them

This paper examines the negative externalities that may occur when a large bank fails, describes the nature of those externalities, and explores whether they may be greater in a case involving a large cross-border banking organization. The analysis suggests that the chief negative externalities are associated with credit losses and losses due to liquidity problems, and these losses are critically affected by how promptly an insolvent institution is closed, how quickly depositors gain access to their funds, and how long it takes borrowers to reestablish credit relationships. While regulatory delay and forbearance may affect the size and distribution of losses, the likely incident of systemic risk and the negative externalities are more associated with the structure of the applicable bankruptcy laws and methods available to resolve a failed institution and quickly get it operating again. This circumstance implies that regulatory concerns about systemic risk should be directed first at closing institutions promptly, reforming bankruptcy statutes to admit special procedures for handling bank failures, and providing mechanisms to give creditors and borrowers prompt and immediate access to their funds and lines of credit.

Bank Risk, Capitalization and Inefficiency

This paper employs a simultaneous equations approach to measuring the tradeoffs between risk, capitalization and measured inefficiencies in a sample of 254 large bank holding companies over the period 1986 through 1991. The results confirm the belief that these three variables are simultaneously determined. Furthermore, asymmetries were identified in the relationship between risk and inefficiencies. Support was found in the asset risk equations for the hypothesis that less efficient institutions took on more risk to off set this inefficiency, thereby transferring risk to the deposit insurance finds. Similarly, less efficient institutions tended to be less well capitalized, a result that may also be associated with differences in management quality. Finally, evidence is provided that risk averse managers tend to expend real resources to reduce asset risk, which makes them appear to be inefficient, when compared to efficiency measures derived under the assumption of risk neutrality. This paper was presented at the Financial Institutions Center's October 1996 conference on "

Evaluating Wall Street Journal survey forecasters: a multivariate approach

This paper proposes a methodology for assessing the joint performance of multivariate forecasts of economic variables. The methodology is illustrated by comparing the rankings of forecasters by the Wall Street Journal with the authors’ alternative rankings. The results show that the methodology can provide useful insights as to the certainty of forecasts as well as the extent to which various forecasts are similar or different.Forecasting

Financial regulatory structure and the resolution of conflicting goals

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.Banks and banking ; Banking structure

Bank crisis resolution and foreign-owned banks

In many countries in recent years, failure to efficiently resolve large insolvent banks has come at a high cost both to taxpayers and to the countries’ aggregate income. The increasing entry of foreign banks has complicated the resolution process. ; This article explores some special problems in the efficient resolution of insolvent banks raised by cross border banking, particularly weighing the costs and benefits of foreign bank entry via branches versus subsidiary banks. These problems lie primarily in the cross country differences in both the closure rule and the deposit insurance structure. ; The authors propose a four-point program for resolving insolvent institutions efficiently but note that the presence of foreign-owned banks may make adhering to these principles difficult. To mitigate these problems, the authors propose several policies: central multinational deposit insurance, a single insolvency resolution agency, and common or harmonized laws regarding insolvency resolution and enforcement. ; In the absence of such policies, the authors suggest that entry by way of subsidiaries rather than branches presents the lesser set of problems for the host country. For all forms of entry, they conclude, resolution costs can be most effectively controlled through the universal adoption of well-designed and enforced prompt corrective action policies and legal closure rules based on market values of assets and liabilities.Bank failures

Agency problems and goal conflicts

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

The major supervisory initiatives post-FDICIA: Are they based on the goals of PCA? Should they be?

The prompt corrective action provisions in FDICIA 1991 provide the supervisors with an unambiguous goal: "to resolve the problems of insured depository institutions at the least possible long-term cost to the deposit insurance fund." Yet performance of the regulators in achieving this goal has been lacking in that substantial losses continue to be imposed on the insurance funds when banks fail. Is PCA misguided, or are there incentive defects in the law and how the requirements are being administered? This paper analyzes these issues in the context of recent proposals to reform the deposit insurance system.Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act of 1991 ; Financial institutions ; Deposit insurance ; Bank supervision

Reforming deposit insurance and FDICIA

Current discussions about deposit insurance reform center on issues such as the size of insurance premiums, the size of the fund, and the size of the coverage limits-all issues that reflect a concern with how to allocate the losses arising from bank failures. The authors of this article argue that such issues, while important, do not affect the performance of the deposit insurance system nor should they be the focus of deposit insurance reform. They suggest that reform efforts should be directed toward strengthening the incentives to enforce the least cost resolution provisions of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act of 1991 (FDICIA). ; The authors make the case that the large losses the FDIC has borne with some bank failures were due to supervisory forbearance. They suggest that a useful step forward would be to carry out FDICIA's mandate to develop and implement market value-type disclosures of the value of banks' assets and liabilities. Increasing the transparency of bank risk taking, as academics have long argued, would improve regulators' ability to monitor bank risk exposure. These reforms, combined with a different approach to risk-based premiums and measures to strengthen market discipline, such as expanded use of subordinated debt, merit further consideration as potential partial solutions to the problem of implementing FDICIA.Bank supervision ; Deposit insurance