The Lender of Last Resort: Liquidity Provision Versus the Possibility of Bail-out

Banking regulation has proven to be inadequate to guard systemic stability in the recent financial crisis. Central banks have provided liquidity and ministries of finance have set up rescue programmes to restore confidence and stability. Using a model of a systemic bank suffering from liquidity shocks, we find that the unregulated bank keeps too much liquidity and takes excessive risk compared to the social optimum. A Lender of Last Resort can alleviate the liquidity problem, but induces moral hazard. Therefore, we introduce a fiscal authority that is able to bail out the bank by injecting capital. This authority faces a trade-off: when it imposes strict bailout conditions, investment increases but moral hazard ensues. Milder bailout conditions reduce excessive risk taking at the expense of investment. This resembles the current situation on financial markets, in which banks take less risk but also provide less credit to the economy.Bank Regulation;Lender of Last Resort;Liquidity;Capital;Bailout

Bank risk, bailouts and ambiguity

The theoretical analysis in the second part investigates the effect of liquidity assistance and bailouts on bank risk taking and liquidity choice. Furthermore, it explores the possibilities for central banks to create ambiguity about liquidity assistance, thereby influencing bank choices. The results in this thesis have implications for the reform of financial regulation and the safety net. Banks have become more systemically relevant; new regulation has to take this into account. Moreover, a new financial safety net should involve suitable bailout penalties and central banks that can resort to constructive ambiguity to give banks proper incentives.

Credit risk transfer activities and systemic risk:How banks became less risky individually but posed greater risks to the financial system at the same time

A main cause of the crisis of 2007–2009 is the various ways through which banks have transferred credit risk in the financial system. We study the systematic risk of banks before the crisis, using two samples of banks respectively trading Credit Default Swaps (CDS) and issuing Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs). After their first usage of either risk transfer method, the share price beta of these banks increases significantly. This suggests the market anticipated the risks arising from these methods, long before the crisis. We additionally separate this beta effect into a volatility and a market correlation component. Quite strikingly, this decomposition shows that the increase in the beta is solely due to an increase in banks’ correlations. Thus, while banks may have shed their individual credit risk, they actually posed greater systemic risk. This creates a challenge for financial regulation, which has typically focused on individual institutions

The Lender of Last Resort: Liquidity Provision Versus the Possibility of Bail-out

Banking regulation has proven to be inadequate to guard systemic stability in the recent financial crisis. Central banks have provided liquidity and ministries of finance have set up rescue programmes to restore confidence and stability. Using a model of a systemic bank suffering from liquidity shocks, we find that the unregulated bank keeps too much liquidity and takes excessive risk compared to the social optimum. A Lender of Last Resort can alleviate the liquidity problem, but induces moral hazard. Therefore, we introduce a fiscal authority that is able to bail out the bank by injecting capital. This authority faces a trade-off: when it imposes strict bailout conditions, investment increases but moral hazard ensues. Milder bailout conditions reduce excessive risk taking at the expense of investment. This resembles the current situation on financial markets, in which banks take less risk but also provide less credit to the economy