Inci Otker-Robe's blog

Almost five years after the onset of the global financial crisis, much has been done to reform the global financial system, but much is still left to accomplish. Comprehensive reform, once agreed to and implemented in full, will have far-reaching implications for the global financial system and the world economy. In a new book, Building a More Resilient Financial Sector, edited by Aditya Narain, Ceyla Pazarbasioglu, and myself, we summarize our views on various reform proposals discussed since 2008, ranging from various regulatory reforms to supervision, too-important-to-fail (TITF) proposals, restricting banks’ size and scope, resolution, and to living wills.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF), alongside the Bank for International Settlements and Financial Stability Board, has been at the forefront of discussions on shaping the new financial system to reduce the possibility of future crises and limit the consequences if they occur. Current reforms are moving in the right direction towards building a more resilient financial system capable of supporting sustainable economic growth, but many policy choices—both urgent and challenging—still lie ahead. Progress has been made in some areas, including in reforming capital (including for systemically important financial institutions—SIFIs), recognizing the importance of a wider regulatory perimeter to oversee shadow banks, improving supervision, disclosure, and resolution regimes, and addressing incentives for risk-taking. Policymakers put forward some novel ideas, such as living wills and contingent capital (CoCos). But they lagged in implementation in many areas, while disagreeing over others.

Less than six years ago, policymakers were concerned about a credit boom in central and eastern Europe (see, e.g., Enoch and Otker-Robe, 2007). Now, as the Eurozone debt crisis has taken center stage and bank deleveraging has picked up speed, they worry about a massive credit crunch across Europe, with potentially damaging spillover effects around the world.

How did we get here? How big is the problem? And what is the way forward?

The 2008-09 Crisis: From credit crescendo…

A combination of complex global and domestic factors including structural global imbalances, incentives supported by economic policies and implicit government or supra-national guarantees, and industry practices allowed massive amounts of easy credit to flow from domestic and international sources to doubtful parts of the private sector such as risky mortgages and real estate projects, triggering unsustainable credit booms and asset bubbles across the world. (Much has been written on the topic. See, for example, Brunnermeier 2009, or Obstfeld and Rogoff 2009).

The unprecedented scope and intensity of the ongoing global financial crisis has underscored the too-important-to-fail (TITF) problem associated with systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs). Ahead of the crisis, implicit government backing permitted these institutions to take on greater risks without being adequately subjected to market discipline, and to enjoy a competitive funding advantage over systemically less important institutions. When the crisis broke, their scale, complexity, and interconnectedness, which had made them difficult to manage and supervise, also proved too significant to permit them to fail. The large-scale public support provided during the crisis has reinforced the moral hazard problem and allowed SIFIs to grow even more complex and larger.

In a recent IMF Staff Position Note with my coauthors, Aditya Narain, Anna Ilyina, Jay Surti, and other IMF colleagues, we found that a regionally diverse group of 84 banks, which are sufficiently large or interconnected to be considered systemic at national, regional, or global levels, doubled their share of total global financial assets over the period 2000-09, to about a quarter (Figure 1). The assets of some of these banks exceed multiples of the size of their home economies (Figure 2). This importance, in turn, gives such banks greater influence over the regulatory and legislative process and a competitive advantage over systemically less important institutions, while making the rescue of such institutions, when they get into trouble, a very costly affair. In countries affected by the recent financial crisis, governments protected many of these institutions from failure by providing direct and indirect support to contain the damage to the broader economy (the direct support, excluding guarantees, is estimated at 6.4 percent of GDP on average in the most crisis-affected countries in end-2010).