Martin Cihak's blog

Words, words, words: do they matter in finance? And, more to the point, do reports on financial stability have an impact on, say, financial stability? New research suggests that the answer is a qualified “yes”: such reports can actually have a positive link with financial stability, if they are done well. Reports that are written clearly, are consistent over time, and cover the key risks to stability are associated with more stable financial systems.

Publishing reports on financial stability has been a rapidly growing industry, with more and more central banks and other agencies around the world now publishing such reports. As of early 2012, around 80 such reports are being issued on a regular basis (Figure 1). The stated aim of most of these reports is to point out key risks and vulnerabilities to policy makers, market participants, and the public at large, and thereby ultimately helping to limit financial instability.

Figure 1. The number of countries that publish financial stability reports

Source: Čihák, Muñoz, Teh Sharifuddin, and Tintchev (2012).

More than three years after the onset of the global financial crisis, a plethora of regulatory reforms are being put in place. The Basel Committee has prepared new capital and liquidity requirements, and the Financial Stability Board has kicked off an impressive agenda of reform. But implementation has been far from straightforward, and domestic priorities have often been in conflict with attempts at regulatory convergence. Against this background, the International Centre for Financial Regulation (ICFR) and the Financial Times invited submissions for a research prize in financial regulation, calling for essays that would consider “what good regulation should look like”.

The call resulted in an interesting set of ten top-rated essays. One of them is a new paper that we co-authored with R. Barry Johnston, based on some of the background work for the World Bank’s upcoming 2013 Global Financial Development Report. In our piece (which of course represents only our views and not necessarily those of the World Bank), we answer the organizers’ question by saying that “good regulation needs to fix the broken incentives.” Or, to paraphrase a 1990s campaign slogan, “it’s the incentives, stupid.”

When a country’s banking sector becomes more linked to banks abroad, does it get more or less prone to a banking crisis? In other words, should cross-border banking linkages be welcomed? Or should they be approached with caution or perhaps even suppressed in some way?

The recent global financial crisis has illustrated quite dramatically that increased financial linkages across borders can have a ‘dark side’: they can make it easier for disruptions in one country to be transmitted to other countries and to mutate into systemic problems with global implications. 

But financial cross-border linkages may also benefit economies in various ways. They can provide new funding and investment opportunities, contributing to rapid economic growth, as witnessed in many countries in the early part of the 2000s. The more ‘dense’ linkages also provide a greater diversity of funding options, so when there are funding problems in one jurisdiction, there are potentially many ‘safety valves’ in terms of alternative funding.

If you owned a commercial bank and it started creating losses, you would probably want to replace the bank’s managers, right? In fact, you would probably like to replace them before the bank starts generating losses. And if your bank’s managers knew in advance that they would get fired if they don’t ensure the bank’s financial soundness, they would work to ensure that the bank is financially sound, correct? Well, it is not that simple.

Yes, when banks dip into the red, their managers do lose jobs. Indeed, losses incurred by U.S. banks during the recent financial crisis coincided with forced departures of their executives. In addition to highly-publicized executive turnovers in major financial institutions, such as Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, there have also been many turnovers at smaller and less widely known banks such as Douglass National Bank and Riverside Bank. The reasons for the turnovers are not always clear, although various explanations can be found. For example, when Riverside Bank CEO John Moran was fired in June 2008, one of the board members was quoted as saying “John is a great banker, unfortunately he'd never been through the tough times of banking right now. … He's not as seasoned as what we need in today's banking climate.”

My previous blog post introduced the Global Financial Development Report (GFDR), a new series of publications by the World Bank Group. Each of these GFDRs will feature a financial sector topic that is prominent on the international agenda. In the first edition, slated for release in September 2012, we’ll be focusing on one of the most pressing issues faced by policymakers in the wake of the global financial crisis: Rethinking the Role of Government in Finance.

In the decades preceding the global financial crisis, we have seen a steady push towards lowering the role of government in finance. On balance, empirical studies on the topic have been pointing out the harmful effects of government interventions. Policymakers had absorbed these ideas, and we saw that the market shares of state-owned financial institutions have been on the decline in the runup to the crisis. We also saw a broader trend towards reducing the role of government regulation and leaving more scope for market discipline.

The crisis has disrupted this trend, and revived the notion that government, through more stringent regulations and other interventions (including possibly direct ownership of financial institutions) can help maintain stability, drive growth, and create jobs. Is this rethinking warranted? Are market failures more severe than government failures? This topic is highly relevant for the post-crisis policy debates, and it is likely to remain so in the coming years.

How should we measure and assess financial development around the globe? Why has financial development progressed so quickly in some regions and countries while seriously lagging in other parts of the world? At what point does the financial sector become too large or too complex? What mix of banks, other financial institutions, and financial markets is the best from the broader development perspective? How to ensure healthy competition in the provision of financial services? Which policies help in supporting robust financial development, and which ones do not? And which ones help in providing people and firms with better access to finance?

These are just some examples of questions to be addressed by a new annual publication, the Global Financial Development Report (GFDR), a flagship report of the World Bank Group. As highlighted by its title, the report will have global coverage with a focus on finance and an explicit developmental angle. The GFDR will provide an overview and assessment of financial sector development around the world, with a particular attention on medium- and low-income countries. The preliminary target release date for the inaugural issue, GFDR 2013, is September 2012.