Knowledge that Transforms

Having started by describing the background to the crisis, the paper considers priorities for action by the financial industry, being: (1) improved transparency; (2) review valuation issues, notably the distinctions between IFRS and US GAAP on asset reclassification; (3) better risk management, with an appropriate mix of quantitative and qualitative metrics; (4) Improved market infrastructure, perhaps including a central counterparty for OTC derivatives; (5) an external review of ratings agencies’ processes; (6) enhanced liquidity risk management. An assessment of the measures taken by central banks to allay the crisis follows, and we conclude with an analysis of the strategic consequences for the financial industry.

Traditional asset–liability management techniques limit banks’ abilities to structure their balance sheets—but more recently, financial innovations have allowed banks the chance to manage interest rate risk without constraining their asset–liability choices. Using canonical correlation analysis, we examine how the relationships between asset and liability accounts at U.S. commercial banks changed between 1990 and 2005. Importantly, we show that asset–liability linkages are weaker for banks that are intensive users of risk-mitigation strategies such as interest rate swaps and adjustable loans. Perhaps surprisingly, we find that asset–liability linkages are stronger at large banks than at small banks, although these size-based differences have diminished over time, both because of increased asset–liability linkages at small banks and decreased linkages at large banks.

There are numerous aspects concerning financial regulation which the current financial turmoil has high-lighted. These include: (1) the form of deposit insurance; (2) bank solvency regimes, ‘prompt corrective action’; (3) Central Banks’ money market operations; (4) commercial bank liquidity risk management; (5) procyclicality of CARs (and mark-to-market); lack of counter-cyclical instruments; (5) boundaries of regulation, conduits, SIVs and reputational risk; (6) crisis management: (a) within countries, e.g. UK Tripartite Committee; or (b) cross-border, how to allocate the burden of cross-border defaults? This paper describes how the crisis exposed regulatory failings, drawing largely on UK experience, and suggests remedies.

This article empirically tests the hypothesis that credit-screening standards can be first increasing and then decreasing in the quality of the bank's pool of potential borrowers, which in turn may vary through the business cycle or across different segments of the lending markets. A key implication is that banks with lending opportunities toward the middle of the quality spectrum can have loan portfolios that perform better than do the portfolios of banks with loan-origination opportunities that are either too weak or too strong. Using banks’ volume of secondary-market loan sales as a proxy for the richness of lending opportunities, I find an inverse U-shaped relation between the performance of banks’ loan portfolios and their activity in the loan sales market. The pattern deserves scrutiny for its policy implications, as many regulators hold the view that countercyclical variation in credit standards may have a destabilizing effect on business cycles.

A large number of bank failures occurred in transition countries during the 1990s and at the beginning of the 2000s. These were related to increases in non-performing loans and deteriorated cost efficiency of banks. This paper addresses the question of the causality between non-performing loans and cost efficiency in order to examine whether either of these factors is the deep determinant of bank failures. We extend the Granger-causality model developed by [Berger, A., DeYoung, R., 1997. Problem loans and cost efficiency in commercial banks. J. Banking Finance 21, 849–870] by applying GMM dynamic panel estimators on a panel of Czech banks between 1994 and 2005. Our findings support the bad management hypothesis, according to which deteriorations in cost efficiency precede increases in non-performing loans. Banking supervisors should consequently focus on enhanced cost efficiency of banks in order to reduce the likelihood of bank failures in transition countries.