International Liquidity And The Financial Crisis

Explains how the financial crisis spread across the world, how damage was contained and how the monetary world has changed.

In the ongoing financial crisis, policy makers have for the most part appeared to be reactive, formulating emergency solutions as events unfold. However, in contrast to their performance during the Great Depression, central banks around the world, led by the Federal Reserve, acted decisively following the collapse of Lehman Brothers and provided huge injections of liquidity into the financial markets, thereby preventing a far worse outcome. International Liquidity and the Financial Crisis compares the 2008 crisis with the disaster of 1931 and explores the similarities and differences. It considers the lasting effects of the crisis on international liquidity, the possibilities for an international lender of last resort, and the enlargement of the International Monetary Fund after the crisis. It shows that there is no clear demarcation between monetary and macro-prudential policies, and discusses how central banks need to adapt to a new environment in which global liquidity is much scarcer.

Tirole analyzes the current views on financial crises and on the reform of the international financial architecture. Based on the Paolo Baffi Lecture the author delivered at the Bank of Italy, this refreshingly accessible book is teeming with rich insights that researchers, policy makers, and students at all levels will find indispensable.

One of the lessons learned from the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–9 is that minimum capital requirements are a necessary but inadequate safeguard for the stability of an intermediary. Despite the high levels of capitalization of many banks before the crisis, they too experienced serious difficulties due to insufficient liquidity buffers. Thus, for the first time, after the GFC regulators realized that liquidity risk can jeopardize the orderly functioning of a bank and, in some cases, its survival. Previously, the risk did not receive the same attention by regulators at the international level as other types of risk including credit, market, and operational risks. The GFC promoted liquidity risk to a significant place in regulatory reform, introducing uniform international rules and best practices. The literature has studied the potential effects of the new liquidity rules on the behaviour of banks, the financial system, and the economy as a whole. This book provides a comprehensive understanding of the bank liquidity crisis that occurred during the GFC, of the liquidity regulatory reform introduced by the Basel Committee with the Basel III Accord, and its implications both at the micro and macroeconomic levels. Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore contributed to the funding of this research project and its publication.

This note reviews some concepts of global liquidity and discusses measurement approaches that have been used by various interlocutors, including at the BIS, by Fund staff, and in academia. Some measures that could be regularly monitored by policy makers are presented

The interventions of crisis management during the 2007 to 2011 financial crisis were not simply responses to a set of given developments in markets, banking or neo-liberal capitalism. Nor can those interventions be adequately explained as the actions of sovereign state officials and institutions. Instead, Langley argues, processes of crisis governance are shown to have established six principal technical problems to be acted upon: liquidity, toxicity, solvency, risk, regulation, and debt and that the governance of these technical problems, is shown to have been strategically assembled in order to secure the continuation of a particular, financialized way of life that depends upon global financial circulations. Contributing to interdisciplinary debates in cultural economy and the social studies of finance, and grounded in extensive empirical research, this book offers an innovative analysis of how the contemporary global financial crisis was governed. Through an exploration of the interventions made by central banks, treasuries, and regulatory authorities in the Anglo-American heartland of the crisis between 2007 and 2011, experimental and strategic apparatuses of crisis governance are shown to have emerged. These discrete apparatuses established the six technical problems to be acted upon, but also shared certain proclivities and preferences. Crisis governance assembled discourses and devices of economy in relation with sovereign monetary, fiscal, and regulatory techniques, and elicited an affective atmosphere of confidence. It also sought to secure the financialized way of life which turns on the opportunities ostensibly afforded by uncertain financial circulations, and gave rise to post-crisis technical fixes designed to advance the resilience of banking and the macro-prudential regulation of financial stability. Thus, the consensus that prevails across economics, political economy, and beyond - wherein sovereign state institutions are cast as coming to the rescue of the markets, banking, or neo-liberal capitalism - conceals a great deal more than it reveals about the governance of the global financial crisis.

Annotation Provides an analysis of the global monetary system and proposes a comprehensive yet evolutionary reform of the system aimed at creating better monetary cooperation for the twenty-first century.

The 2007 financial and economic crisis that began in the United States and quickly spread around the world differed from earlier crises in a number of significant ways. This book examines the causes of these events in the US, and their impacts on North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. As with previous crises, real estate booms and busts and excessive financial leverage played key roles; however, the most recent crisis had many unique aspects to it, all of which are explored here in depth. This includes the role played by large international banks, shadow banks, increased global liquidity, population growth and other factors. Collectively, these factors contributed to interconnected economies and financial markets to an extent that never existed before. The net result was the unprecedented ripple effect of the crisis from the US and into the rest of the world. The impact in the US was significantly different than the impact in Canada, Japan, Spain and other countries. Significantly, the global effects of the crisis varied widely from country to country, as did government responses to the crisis. The contributors to this book international academics, bank regulators, and practitioners critique the crises and important international regulatory issues from the point of view of various countries. Academics, regulators, legislators and financial practitioners will do well to add this book to their shelves.