New rules for euro area bank bailouts

Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, senior fellow of the Peterson Institute, has published an excellent summary on the euro area’s political deal for bank recapitalisation and resolution, targeted at breaking “doom loops”, i.e. escalating negative feedback of banking and sovereign solvency troubles. The key parts, from a market perspective, are (i) the possibility of direct recapitalisation of banks through the European Stability Mechanism (even retroactively) and (ii) stricter bail-in rules for private bond and equity owners.

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The “reach for yield” bias of institutional investors

‘Reach for yield’ describes regulated investors’ preference for high-risk assets within the confines of a rule-based risk metric (such as credit ratings or VaR). Bo Becker and Victoria Ivashina provide evidence that U.S. insurance companies act on this principle and show that ”conditional on ratings, insurance portfolios are systematically biased toward higher yield bonds”. ‘Reach for yield’ would be a form of regulatory arbitrage, a source of inefficiency, and a reward for “unaccounted risk” of securities and issuers.

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