Balance Sheet Network Analysis Of Too Connected To Fail Risk In Global And Domestic Banking Systems

The 2008/9 financial crisis highlighted the importance of evaluating vulnerabilities owing to interconnectedness, or Too-Connected-to-Fail risk, among financial institutions for country monitoring, financial surveillance, investment analysis and risk management purposes. This paper illustrates the use of balance sheet-based network analysis to evaluate interconnectedness risk, under extreme adverse scenarios, in banking systems in mature and emerging market countries, and between individual banks in Chile, an advanced emerging market economy.

The IMF has had extensive involvement in the stress testing of financial systems in its member countries. This book presents the methods and models that have been developed by IMF staff over the years and that can be applied to the gamut of financial systems. An added resource for readers is the companion CD-Rom, which makes available the toolkit with some of the models presented in the book (also located at elibrary.imf.org/page/stress-test-toolkit).

In this paper we explore the properties of the global banking network using cross-border bank lending data for 184 countries over 1978-2009. Specifically, we analyze financial interconnectedness using network metrics of centrality, connectivity, and clustering. We document a relatively unstable global banking network, with structural breaks in network indicators identifying several waves of capital flows. Interconnectedness rankings, especially for borrowers, are relatively volatile over the period. Connectivity tends to fall during and after systemic banking crises and sovereign debt crises. The 2008-09 global financial crisis stands out as an unusually large perturbation to the cross-border banking network.

The cornerstone of Chile’s impressive fiscal performance and strong fiscal system has been its structural balance rule. It has helped to insulate public spending from copper price cycles and improve the government’s net financial position. Chile should adopt a full-fledged medium-term fiscal framework to improve fiscal planning and provide a framework for addressing temporary deviations from the fiscal rule. Publishing additional fiscal indicators in the budget, such as the non-copper structural balance, could provide more comprehensive information on the impact of fiscal policy on the domestic demand.

Shortly after the financial crisis of 2007-2008 many authors began to write about certain “huge institutions” potentially able to damage the entire financial system through negative shocks, approaching the issue of systemic risk in banking through the evaluation of the so called “Too-Big-to-Fail” actors. While the size of a bank is certainly a factor of risk when considering systemic implications, this book also explores the properties of some deeply interconnected institutions. The author’s main intuition is based on the renowned work by Mark Granovetter on “The Strength of Weak Ties” and “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness”: dangerous flows, like financial shocks, may travel very quickly through networks in unexpectedly efficient ways thanks to “Weak Ties”. The existence of weaker yet longer ties implies a naturally “robust yet fragile” network where even distant actors are closely interconnected, sharing both opportunities and risks. As a consequence, some nodes may act as key actors under the structural perspective. It is therefore critical for the central authority to identify and closely monitor said institutions. Thanks to a journey through the history of Social Network Analysis this book offers a complete overview on the evolution of the methodology and the most recent applications to systemic risk assessment, which are completed by a critical approach towards the “Too-Interconnected-to-Fail” perspective.

Effective cross-border financial surveillance requires the monitoring of direct and indirect systemic linkages. This paper illustrates how network analysis could make a significant contribution in this regard by simulating different credit and funding shocks to the banking systems of a number of selected countries. After that, we show that the inclusion of risk transfers could modify the risk profile of entire financial systems, and thus an enriched simulation algorithm able to account for risk transfers is proposed. Finally, we discuss how some of the limitations of our simulations are a reflection of existing information and data gaps, and thus view these shortcomings as a call to improve the collection and analysis of data on cross-border financial exposures.

This paper applies network analysis to assess the extent of systemic vulnerabilities in the ECCU banking system. It includes two sets of illustrative stress tests. First, solvency and liquidity shocks to each individual bank and the impact on other banks in the network through their biltareal net asset exposures. Second, country and region-wide tail shocks to GDP affecting capital and liquidity of all banks in the shocked jurisdictions, followed by the rippling effects through the regional network. The results identify systemic institutions that merit hightened attention by the regulator, as determined by the degree of connectivity with the rest of the system, and the extent to which they are vulnerable to the failure of other banks.

The unprecedented collapse of international interbank borrowing was a prominent feature of the global financial crisis that started in August 2007. This paper focuses on the drivers of the retrenchment from 32 advanced and emerging banking systems. Using novel risk-weighted indexes the paper examines whether the banking systems’ access to credit was related to their domestic financial soundness and exposure to distressed international counterparties. The empirical findings suggest that both domestic and international risk factors contributed to the decline in international interbank borrowing during the crisis.