The Lender Of Last Resort Function After The Global Financial Crisis

The global financial crisis (GFC) has renewed interest in emergency liquidity support (sometimes referred to as “Lender of Last Resort”) provided by central banks to financial institutions and challenged the traditional way of conducting these operations. Despite a vast literature on the topic, central bank approaches and practices vary considerably. In this paper we focus on, for the most part, the provision of idiosyncratic support, approaching it from an operational perspective; highlighting different approaches adopted by central banks; and also identifying some of the issues that arose during the GFC.

This paper develops a model of the lender of last resort. It provides an analytical basis for “too big too fail” and a rationale for “constructive ambiguity”. Key results are that if contagion (moral hazard) is the main concern, the Central Bank (CB) will have an excessive (little) incentive to rescue banks and the resulting equilibrium risk level is high (low). When both contagion and moral hazard are jointly analyzed, the CB’s incentives to rescue are only slightly weaker than with contagion alone. The CB’s optimal policy may be non-monotonic in bank size.

Collects a series of lectures the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve gave in 2012 about the Federal Reserve and the 2008 financial crisis.

Conventional wisdom says that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) functions as the de facto international lender of last resort (ILLR) for the global financial system. However, that premise is incomplete. Brother, Can You Spare a Billion? explores how the U.S. has for decades regularly complemented the Fund's ILLR role by selectively providing billions of dollars in emergency loans to foreign economies in crisis. Why would the U.S. ever put national financial resources at risk to "bail out" foreign countries? McDowell argues that the U.S. has been compelled to provide such rescues unilaterally when it believes the IMF's multilateral response is too slow or too small to protect vital U.S. economic interests. Through a combination of historical case studies and statistical analysis, McDowell uncovers the defensive motives behind U.S. decisions to provide global liquidity from the 1960s through the 2008 global financial crisis. Moving beyond conventional wisdom, this book paints a complete picture of how international financial crises have been managed and highlights the unique role the U.S. has played in stabilizing the world economy in troubled times.

"Highlights how losses in the US subprime market had spread beyond the confines of the US mortgage sector and the borders of the United States, how risk spreads had ballooned and liquidity in some markets had dried up forcing large financial institutions to report significant losses. Bank runs were no longer the stuff of history." - Cover.

The 2008 financial crisis poses three fundamental questions for economists and policy makers; understanding the origins of the crisis, understanding the consequences of this crisis for the world economy, and finally understanding why the 2008 financial crisis is not as serious as the 1929 crisis. The prevailing view is that the 2008 financial crisis was solely the result of inadequate financial regulation together with a very loose monetary policy conducted by central banks, especially the Fed. It is believed that this crisis is a temporary detour in the normal course of the events, so that in the near future capitalist economies will resume the high growth path observed before the crisis. In terms of the third question, there is a widespread view that the fundamental reason that explains the avoidance of the harmful experiences of 1929 was the fiscal and monetary policy expansions in developed countries. No important role is assigned to developing countries in terms of the effects of the financial crisis. This book challenges the prevailing orthodoxy surrounding the origins and the consequences of the 2008 financial crisis. The book demonstrates that measures in addition to a profound change in the financial regulation are required if a new financial crisis is to be avoided in the future, measures include: a change in the conduct of economic policy; a reform of the national and international monetary systems; and a radical change in the pattern of income distribution. This book is essential reading for all interested in macroeconomics, monetary policy, development economics and the global impact of the financial crisis.

The capacity of national central banks to 'step in' and bail out an economy is one which has proved to be vitally important over the years. This collection from Wood and Capie brings together important literature for the first time in book form.