Liquidity And Crises

One important cause of the 2007-2009 crisis was illiquidity combined with exposure of many financial institutions to liquidity needs. But what is liquidity and why is it so important for financial institutions to command enough liquidity? This book brings together classic articles and recent contributions to this important field.

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 book analyses the logic of applying the American Post-Keynesian economist Hyman Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis (FIH) to the financial crisis of 2007–08. Arguing that most theories of financial crisis, including Minsky’s own, only describe events, but do not actually explain them, the book surveys theories of financial crisis that have been developed to describe instability in the post-WW2 US financial system and analyses them in their historical context. The book argues that explanation of the financial crisis of 2007–08 should involve interpretation of the concept of 'risk', which guides the construction and pricing of contemporary financial products such as derivatives and asset backed securities, as a form of 'liquidity', the concept that Minsky sought to explain the financial crises of the 1970s and 1980s with. The book highlights the continuing relevance of Minsky’s theory of liquidity crisis as "immanent", in a historical sense, to the products and trading practices of modern finance, because these products were developed to obviate the crisis dynamics that Minsky described. Minsky's FIH can therefore inform historical understanding of the crisis of 2007–08 but is not directly explanatory itself. The book explores explanation of the financial crisis of 2007–08 interpreting 'liquidity', in practical historical terms, as involving a process of development out of prior crisis dynamics. Seeking to contribute to debates over the causes of the financial crisis of 2007–08 by blending a discussion of historicizing philosophy, economic theory and contemporary financial banking and trading practices this work will be of great interest to scholars of international political economy, heterodox economics and critical theory.

Bank Liquidity Creation and Financial Crises delivers a consistent, logical presentation of bank liquidity creation and addresses questions of research and policy interest that can be easily understood by readers with no advanced or specialized industry knowledge. Authors Allen Berger and Christa Bouwman examine ways to measure bank liquidity creation, how much liquidity banks create in different countries, the effects of monetary policy (including interest rate policy, lender of last resort, and quantitative easing), the effects of capital, the effects of regulatory interventions, the effects of bailouts, and much more. They also analyze bank liquidity creation in the US over the past three decades during both normal times and financial crises. Narrowing the gap between the "academic world" (focused on theories) and the "practitioner world" (dedicated to solving real-world problems), this book is a helpful new tool for evaluating a bank’s performance over time and comparing it to its peer group. Explains that bank liquidity creation is a more comprehensive measure of a bank’s output than traditional measures and can also be used to measure bank liquidity Describes how high levels of bank liquidity creation may cause or predict future financial crises Addresses questions of research and policy interest related to bank liquidity creation around the world and provides links to websites with data and other materials to address these questions Includes such hot-button topics as the effects of monetary policy (including interest rate policy, lender of last resort, and quantitative easing), the effects of capital, the effects of regulatory interventions, and the effects of bailouts

What causes a financial crisis? Can financial crises be anticipated or even avoided? What can be done to lessen their impact? Should governments and international institutions intervene? Or should financial crises be left to run their course? In the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis, many blamed international institutions, corruption, governments, and flawed macro and microeconomic policies not only for causing the crisis but also unnecessarily lengthening and deepening it. Based on ten years of research, the authors develop a theoretical approach to analyzing financial crises. Beginning with a review of the history of financial crises and providing readers with the basic economic tools needed to understand the literature, the authors construct a series of increasingly sophisticated models. Throughout, the authors guide the reader through the existing theoretical and empirical literature while also building on their own theoretical approach. The text presents the modern theory of intermediation, introduces asset markets and the causes of asset price volatility, and discusses the interaction of banks and markets. The book also deals with more specialized topics, including optimal financial regulation, bubbles, and financial contagion.

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

‘Liquidity’, or rather lack of it, lies at the heart of the ongoing global financial crisis. In this collection of essays, the metaphor of money as liquidity, and the model of crisis it entails, is deliberated by a range of scholars from economics, history, anthropology, literature, and sociology. This volume offers a rhetorical explanation of the social, cultural, and historical contexts in which metaphors of money are produced, circulate, and fail. These essays, first presented at "After the Crash, Beyond Liquidity," a conference on money and metaphors held at the University of Virginia, USA, in October of 2009, were drafted in the wake of global uncertainty, TARP bailouts, the Great Recession, programs of stimulus and austerity, and recurrent threats of sovereign default in the EU. They question the language of liquidity and flows that is characteristic of everyday business, exposing what metaphors of money hide and explaining why the idea of liquidity has proved so durable. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Cultural Economy.

This book explores the effect of liquidity on asset prices, liquidity variations over time and how liquidity risk affects prices.