The Lehman bankruptcy highlights the potential for interconnectedness to cause negative externalities through counterparty contagion, but the externalities may also arise from information contagion. We examine troubled financial firms and find that both channels are significant factors in creating spillover effects. Counterparty contagion is greater in cases of riskier firms and larger and more complex exposures. However, the counterparty exposures are small, especially among banks that face diversification regulations, and do not typically cause a cascade of failures. Information contagion is stronger for rivals in the same markets and has a larger impact in cases of distress than in bankruptcies.

We investigate what accounting information is important for explaining the credit risk for U.S. bank holding corporations (BHCs) during the recent crisis and find that several CAMELS variables are significantly associated with credit default swap (CDS) spreads. Consistent with industry experience, BHCs with more real estate loans do have higher credit risk as measured by CDS spread. With the newly available finer disclosures for the securities account, we find a positive association between risky assets-backed securities (ABS) and CDS spreads. Our results confirm real estate risk as a major risk for U.S. BHCs during the recent financial crisis. Moreover, our study highlights the importance of distinguishing loans/securities investments by type in understanding the relationship between accounting information and bank credit risk. In addition, we do not find significant association between several accounting-based risk measures and the CDS spread, a forward-looking market-based risk measure.