Procyclicality And The Search For Early Warning Indicators

This paper compares three types of early warning indicators of financial instability – those based on financial market prices, those based on normalized measures of total credit and those based on liabilities of financial intermediaries. Prices perform well as concurrent indicators of market conditions but are not suitable as early warning indicators. Total credit and liabilities convey similar information and perform better as early warning indicators, but liabilities are more transparent and the decomposition between core and non-core liabilities convey additional useful information.

This book discusses the risks and opportunities that arise in Emerging Asia given the context of a new environment in global liquidity and capital flows. It elaborates on the need to ensure financial and overall economic stability in the region through improved financial regulation and other policy measures to minimize the emergent risks. "Managing Elevated Risk: Global Liquidity, Capital Flows, and Macroprudential Policy—An Asian Perspective" also explores the range of policy options that may be deployed to address the impact of global liquidity on domestic financial and socio-economic conditions including income inequality. The book is primarily aimed at policy makers, financial market regulators and supervisory agencies to help them improve national regulatory systems and to promote harmonization of national regulations and practices in line with global standards. Scholars and researchers will also gain important information and knowledge about the overall impacts of changing global liquidity from the book.

The lingering effects of the economic crisis are still visible—this shows a clear need to improve our understanding of financial crises. This book surveys a wide range of crises, including banking, balance of payments, and sovereign debt crises. It begins with an overview of the various types of crises and introduces a comprehensive database of crises. Broad lessons on crisis prevention and management, as well as the short-term economic effects of crises, recessions, and recoveries, are discussed.

Can the upturns and downturns in financial variables serve as early warning indicators of banking crises? Using data from 59 advanced and emerging economies, we show that financial overheating can be detected in real time. Equity prices and output gap are the best leading indicators in advanced markets; in emerging markets, these are equity and property prices and credit gap. Moreover, aggregating this information flags financial crisis many years before the crisis. Lastly, we find that the length of financial cycles is of medium-term frequency, calling into question the longer frequency widely used in the estimation of countercyclical capital buffers.

This note provides guidance to facilitate the staff’s advice on macroprudential policy in Fund surveillance. It elaborates on the principles set out in the “Key Aspects of Macroprudential Policy,” taking into account the work of international standard setters as well as the evolving country experience with macroprudential policy. The main note is accompanied by supplements offering Detailed Guidance on Instruments and Considerations for Low Income Countries

This paper reviews the literature on financial crises focusing on three specific aspects. First, what are the main factors explaining financial crises? Since many theories on the sources of financial crises highlight the importance of sharp fluctuations in asset and credit markets, the paper briefly reviews theoretical and empirical studies on developments in these markets around financial crises. Second, what are the major types of financial crises? The paper focuses on the main theoretical and empirical explanations of four types of financial crises—currency crises, sudden stops, debt crises, and banking crises—and presents a survey of the literature that attempts to identify these episodes. Third, what are the real and financial sector implications of crises? The paper briefly reviews the short- and medium-run implications of crises for the real economy and financial sector. It concludes with a summary of the main lessons from the literature and future research directions.

In light of on-going global financial crises, the institutional structure of financial regulation is currently a subject of significant academic and practical interest. The financial crisis has called into question the adequacy of financial regulation at the national and supranational levels, and has instigated financial regulatory reforms in major markets overseas. This has included the enactment of the Dodd-Frank Act in the US, and the programme to split the Financial Services Authority in the UK. This book examines the institutional structure reform of financial regulation from a comparative perspective, exploring both fundamental theories and international experiences. The book explores the three main institutional structures of financial regulation in the world; the sectors-based model, adopted in the US, Mainland China and Hong Kong; the twin-peaks model with Australia and the Netherlands as its pioneers; and the single-regulator model as represented by the former Financial Services Authority in the UK and the Financial Services Agency in Japan. The book contains contributions from renowned experts in the field of financial regulation including Douglas Arner, Jeffrey Carmichael, Robin Hui Huang, Dirk Schoenmaker, and Michael Taylor, and will be of interest to students and researchers of banking and finance law, and comparative economics.

We analyze a range of macrofinancial indicators to extract signals about cyclical systemic risk across 107 economies over 1995–2020. We construct composite indices of underlying liquidity, solvency and mispricing risks and analyze their patterns over the financial cycle. We find that liquidity and solvency risk indicators tend to be counter-cyclical, whereas mispricing risk ones are procyclical, and they all lead the credit cycle. Our results lend support to high-level accounts that risks were underestimated by stress indicators in the run-up to the 2008 global financial crisis. The policy implications of conflicting risk signals would depend on the phase of the credit cycle.