Tracking the history of sovereign defaults

March 8, 2014

Bank of Canada has assembled a new broad database on global public debt default. It shows that after sovereign delinquency had exceeded 5% of outstanding debt in the 1980s, it declined alongside falling interest rates to below 1% in the 2000s and has remained low despite the global financial and euro sovereign crises. In a longer (200 year) context sovereign default ratios have moved in long cycles, each stretching over several decades.

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Time-varying macroprudential policy

March 2, 2014

Persistent highly accommodative monetary policy in the U.S. raises fears of building systemic vulnerabilities. Federal Reserve board member Tarullo has discussed the use of time-varying macroprudential policy as a means to contain these risks and to allow monetary policy to keep rates low for longer. This policy has many limitations, however.

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Europe’s bank-sovereign nexus (revisited)

March 1, 2014

A Bank of Italy paper illustrates and explains the rise in European banks’ sovereign debt holding since the great financial crisis. It also reiterates structural causes for bank-sovereign feedback loops. One would conclude that this nexus remains an important factor for market dynamics and monetary policy.

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The impact of high public debt on economic growth

February 22, 2014

Academic work suggests that public debt above 90% of GDP is a drag for GDP growth. This would apply to the developed world today. However, a new IMF paper based on a broad panel of countries going back to 1875 qualifies this rule. It suggests that high debt does not per se reduce growth. Only if debt levels are both elevated and rising, growth tends to suffer. On its own high debt does often entail greater output volatility, however.

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Shadow banking and the backstop problem

February 16, 2014

Modern shadow banking provides large-scale risk transformation services that are highly pro-cyclical (view post here). This is a systemic concern mainly for one reason: most shadow banking activities lack formal transparent backstops, i.e. external risk absorption mechanisms that prevent large negative shocks from escalating.

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How Fed asset purchases reduce yield term premia

February 15, 2014

An updated Federal Reserve paper suggests that there has long been a link between the net supply of government securities and term premia on Treasury yields. A 1%-point reduction in the ratio of Treasuries or MBS (10-year equivalent) to GDP supposedly reduced the 10-year term premium by 10 basis points. A one-year shortening of the average effective duration would lower the ten-year Treasury yield by about 7 basis points. Based on these estimates, the 2008-2011 large scale asset purchase and maturity extension programs of the Federal Reserve could have reduced the 10-year term premium by a total of 150 basis points.

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High-speed trading: lessons from quantum physics

February 14, 2014

Modern physics teaches that objects behave differently as they reach the speed of light. This has become relevant for financial market execution. While prices pretend to be global, in reality they depend on location. Liquidity at any given price is uncertain. And physical location becomes critical for the success of certain trading styles. Moreover, quantum physics suggest that ‘freak events’ that destabilize the markets are likely to occur.

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Developed market bond yields and systemic EM risk

February 9, 2014

A new BIS paper argues that the expansion of EM local-currency bond markets and foreign-currency EM corporate issuance have strengthened the link between local EM financial conditions and global bond yields. The consequences would be (i) increased dependence of emerging financial systems on developed countries’ non-conventional monetary policies, (ii) decreased effectiveness of local monetary policies, and (iii) new systemic risks.

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The rise and risks of central counterparty clearing

February 8, 2014

A brief speech by ECB governing council member Benoît Cœuré summarizes problematic side effects of increased central counterparty clearing in derivatives markets. Systemic threats may arise from unprecedented risk concentrations in a few global central counterparties and participating banks, as well as from the mutualisation of losses and liquidity shortfalls across systemically important institutions.

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Herding in financial markets

February 1, 2014

Herding is a deliberate decision to imitate the actions of others. In financial markets with private information herding can be efficient for an individual asset manager, but increases the risks that the market as a whole is inefficient and fragile, particularly in the case of “information cascades”. A paper of Michael McAleer and Kim Randalj provides empirical evidence of herding in a range of futures markets.

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