Decisions that are privately optimal often impose externalities on other agents, giving rise to regulations aimed at implementing socially optimal outcomes. In the banking industry, regulations are particularly heavy, plausibly reflecting a view by regulators that the relevant externalities could culminate in financial crises and destabilize the broader economy. Over time, the toolkit for regulating banks and bank-like institutions has expanded, as has banks’ restructuring of activities int...| Liberty Street Economics
The financial sector in the U.S. economy is deeply interconnected. In our previous post, we showed that incorporating information about this network of financial claims leads to a substantial reassessment of which financial sectors are ultimately financing the lending to the real sector as a whole (households plus nonfinancial firms). In this post, we delve deeper into the differences between the composition of lending to households and nonfinancial firms in terms of direct lending as well as...| Liberty Street Economics
Long-run trends in increased access to credit are thought to improve real activity. However, “rapid” credit expansions do not always end well and have been shown in the academic literature to predict adverse real outcomes such as lower GDP growth and an increased likelihood of crises. Given these financial stability considerations associated with rapid credit expansions, being able to distinguish in real time “good booms” from “bad booms” is of crucial interest for policymakers. W...| Liberty Street Economics
Global risk conditions, along with monetary policy in major advanced economies, have historically been major drivers of cross-border capital flows and the global financial cycle. So what happens to these flows when risk sentiment changes? In this post, we examine how the sensitivity to risk of global financial flows changed following the global financial crisis (GFC). We find that while the risk sensitivity of cross-border bank loans (CBL) was lower following the GFC, that of international de...| Liberty Street Economics
Nonbank financial institutions (NBFIs) constitute a variety of entities—fintech companies, mutual funds, hedge funds, insurance companies, private debt providers, special purpose vehicles, among others—that have become important providers of financial intermediation services worldwide. But what is the essence of nonbank financial intermediation? Does it have any inherent advantages, and how does it interact with that performed by banks? In this Liberty Street Economics post, which is base...| Liberty Street Economics
A look at how an intricate network of interlinkages within the financial sector finances credit to the real sector.| Liberty Street Economics
Aradillas Fernandez, Hiti, and Sarkar provide a quantitative assessment of systemic risk in the nonbank financial sector.| Liberty Street Economics
A look at decentralized finance, or DeFi, a rapidly growing ecosystem of financial applications built on blockchain technology.| Liberty Street Economics
The authors consider the systemic implications of the observed build-up of bank-NBFI connections associated with the growth of NBFIs.| Liberty Street Economics