Macroprudential Banking Supervision Monetary Policy

An integrated analysis of how financial frictions can be accounted for in macroeconomic models built to study monetary policy and macroprudential regulation. Since the global financial crisis, there has been a renewed effort to emphasize financial frictions in designing closed- and open-economy macroeconomic models for monetary and macroprudential policy analysis. Drawing on the extensive literature of the past decade as well as his own contributions, in this book Pierre-Richard Age&́nor provides a unified set of theoretical and quantitative macroeconomic models with financial frictions to explore issues that have emerged in the wake of the crisis. These include the need to understand better how the financial system amplifies and propagates shocks originating elsewhere in the economy; how it can itself be a source of aggregate fluctuations; the extent to which central banks should account for financial stability considerations in the conduct of monetary policy; whether national central banks and regulators should coordinate their policies to promote macroeconomic and financial stability; and how much countercyclical macroprudential policies should be coordinated at the international level to mitigate financial spillovers across countries.

The European experience suggests that the efforts made to achieve an efficient trade-off between monetary policy and prudential supervision ultimately failed. The severity of the global crisis have pushed central banks to explore innovative tools—within or beyond their statutory constraints—capable of restoring the smooth functioning of the financial cycle, including setting macroprudential policy instruments in the regulatory toolkit. But macroprudential and monetary policies, by sharing multiple transmission channels, may interact—and conflict—with each other. Such conflicts may represent not only an economic challenge in the pursuit of price and financial stability, but also a legal uncertainty characterizing the regulatory developments of the EU macroprudential and monetary frameworks. In analyzing the “legal interaction” between the two frameworks in the EU, this book seeks to provide evidence of the inconsistencies associated with the structural separation of macroprudential and monetary frameworks, shedding light upon the legal instruments that could reconcile any potential policy inconsistency.

ÔThis Handbook is a must read for policy makers and practitioners alike as well as excellent reading for advanced academic courses in international banking.Õ Ð Allard Bruinshoofd, SUERF ÔThis collection of papers is essential reading for anyone interested in central banking, regulation and supervision. Sylvester Eijffinger and Donato Masciandaro have brought together contributions from the leading academics, central bankers and regulators, providing the most up-to-date analysis of this critical subject.Õ Ð Paul Mizen, University of Nottingham, UK This stimulating and original Handbook offers an updated and systematic discussion of the relationship between central banks, financial regulation and supervision after the global financial crisis. The crisis has raised new questions about the compatibility of monetary and financial stability, which are changing the face of central banking and its relationships with the architecture of financial regulation and supervision. The Handbook explores on both the economics and political economy of the topic, in order to understand how and why reforms of the role of the central banks can be designed and implemented. The general suggestion is that future effectiveness of the central banking architecture will depend on its ability to ensure the consistency between the monetary actions in normal and extraordinary times. Consequently the possible paths in the central bank strategies and tactics, as well as in the classic concepts of independence, accountability and transparency, are analyzed and discussed. With chapters written by outstanding scholars in economics, this lucid Handbook will appeal to academics, policymakers and practitioners, ranging from central bankers and supervisory authorities to financial operators. Among the academics it would be of particular interest to financial and monetary economists (including postgraduate students), but the institutional slant and the central theme of relations between economics, institutional settings and politics will also be invaluable for political scientists.

The countercyclical capital buffer (CCB) was proposed by the Basel committee to increase the resilience of the banking sector to negative shocks. The interactions between banking sector losses and the real economy highlight the importance of building a capital buffer in periods when systemic risks are rising. Basel III introduces a framework for a time-varying capital buffer on top of the minimum capital requirement and another time-invariant buffer (the conservation buffer). The CCB aims to make banks more resilient against imbalances in credit markets and thereby enhance medium-term prospects of the economy—in good times when system-wide risks are growing, the regulators could impose the CCB which would help the banks to withstand losses in bad times.

We consider the optimality of various institutional arrangements for agencies that conduct macro-prudential regulation and monetary policy. When a central bank is in charge of price and financial stability, a new time inconsistency problem may arise. Ex-ante, the central bank chooses the socially optimal level of inflation. Ex-post, however, the central bank chooses inflation above the social optimum to reduce the real value of private debt. This inefficient outcome arises when macro-prudential policies cannot be adjusted as frequently as monetary. Importantly, this result arises even when the central bank is politically independent. We then consider the role of political pressures in the spirit of Barro and Gordon (1983). We show that if either the macro-prudential regulator or the central bank (or both) are not politically independent, separation of price and financial stability objectives does not deliver the social optimum.

This paper surveys institutional arrangements for macroprudential policy in Asia. Central banks in Asia typically have a financial stability mandate, and play a key role in the macroprudential framework. Smaller and more open economies with prudential regulation inside the central bank tend to have institutional arrangements that give the central bank a leading role. In larger and more complex economies where prudential regulation is outside the central bank, the financial stability mandate is usually shared with other agencies and the government tends to play a leading role. Domestic policy coordination is typically performed by a financial stability committee/other coordination body while cross-border cooperation is largely governed by Memoranda of Understanding.

An integrated analysis of how financial frictions can be accounted for in macroeconomic models built to study monetary policy and macroprudential regulation. Since the global financial crisis, there has been a renewed effort to emphasize financial frictions in designing closed- and open-economy macroeconomic models for monetary and macroprudential policy analysis. Drawing on the extensive literature of the past decade as well as his own contributions, in this book Pierre-Richard Agénor provides a unified set of theoretical and quantitative macroeconomic models with financial frictions to explore issues that have emerged in the wake of the crisis. These include the need to understand better how the financial system amplifies and propagates shocks originating elsewhere in the economy; how it can itself be a source of aggregate fluctuations; the extent to which central banks should account for financial stability considerations in the conduct of monetary policy; whether national central banks and regulators should coordinate their policies to promote macroeconomic and financial stability; and how much countercyclical macroprudential policies should be coordinated at the international level to mitigate financial spillovers across countries. Agénor focuses on upper middle-income countries, which differ from advanced economies in terms of both their structural features (which include a financial sector dominated by banks, weak supervisory capacity, and a high degree of vulnerability to external shocks) and their long-standing policy challenges (such as managing volatile capital flows). Some of the analytical insights and broad policy lessons that can be drawn from the book will be of relevance to advanced economies as well.

Papers, comments, and special keynote addresses presented at the 13th annual International Banking Conference, sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the International Monetary Fund, held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago on Sept. 23-24, 2010. The subject of the conference was Macroprudential regulatory policies: the new road to financial stability?