Year: 2009
Type: report
Abstract: I. Systemic risk and its prevention The recent financial crisis was unprecedented in scale and speed of propagation. A well recognized reason is that the original shock (started in US real estate funding structures heavily distorted by regulatory arbitrage) was severely compounded by the extreme funding fragility built up by banks (Brunnermeier, 2009). Bank risk absorbing capacity had been reduced not just by lower capital buffers, but by extremely short term funding. The panic withdrawals of wholesale short term investors (Gorton, 2009) propagated and compounded losses as it forced massive distress sales. These in turn caused rapid asset price declines, triggered further margin calls and thus more fire sales across markets. The resulting uncertainty undermined access to new financing, leading to inefficiently rapid deleveraging (Brunnermeier, 2009). After wholesale money markets had been severely dysfunctional for over a year, barely contained by massive liquidity provision, practically all uninsured bank liabilities had to be bailed out after panic broke out in September 2008. The crisis led to a consensus on the need to control propagation risk. Last February we proposed a new macro prudential tool, liquidity risk charges, to discourage liquidity risk creation by banks (Perotti and Suarez, 2009). The
Authors: E.C. Perotti, Javier Suárez
Language: English
Subfield: Finance
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1511446237