This paper seeks to explain how policy actions undertaken at the outset of recent crises—particularly the issuance of extensive liquidity support and government guarantees—absorb off-budget fiscal resources and inappropriately constrain officials’ subsequent options for restructuring their country’s troubled financial and corporate sectors. Empirical evidence supports the commonsense view that the damage a crisis works on a country’s financial sector and on its real economy is lessened by taking market-mimicking actions that promptly estimate and allocate losses during the early stages of a crisis. The most important steps are to plan to call a timeout to separate hopelessly insolvent institutions from potentially viable ones and to provide haircuts, guarantees, and liquidity support in ways that protect taxpayers and avoid subsidizing insolvent institutions’ longshot gambles for resurrection.

In recent decades, a majority of countries have experienced a systemic banking crisis requiring a major – and expensive – overhaul of their banking system. Budgetary outlays, whether immediate or deferred, have exceeded 50% of GDP in some cases. This paper uses cross-country econometric evidence to examine whether the design of crisis containment and resolution policies can systematically influence the overall magnitude of fiscal costs. We find that accommodating policies such as blanket deposit guarantees, open-ended liquidity support, repeated partial recapitalizations, debtor bail-outs and regulatory forbearance all tend to add significantly and sizably to fiscal costs.