Suchergebnisse

Recent bank failures are followed by significant and permanent negative declines in real county income. These declines are larger for small failures than for large failures per dollar of assets, are larger for bank failures than thrift failures, and are larger for bank closures than assisted mergers. More interestingly, the failure of even healthy banks has significant and permanent negative effects on economic activity.

The FDIC used cross-guarantees to close thirty-eight subsidiaries of First RepublicBank Corporation in 1988 and eighteen subsidiaries of First City Bancorporation in 1992 when lead banks from each of these Texas-based bank holding companies were declared insolvent. I use this exogenous failure of otherwise healthy subsidiary banks as a natural experiment for studying the impact of bank failure on local-area real economic activity. I find that the closings of the subsidiaries were associated with a significant decline in bank lending that led to a permanent reduction in real county income of about 3 percent.

We provide a framework for monitoring the shadow banking system. The shadow banking system consists of a web of specialized financial institutions that conduct credit, maturity, and liquidity transformation without direct, explicit access to public backstops. The lack of such access to sources of government liquidity and credit backstops makes shadow banks inherently fragile. Shadow banking activities are often intertwined with core regulated institutions such as bank holding companies, security brokers and dealers, and insurance companies. These interconnections of shadow banks with other financial institutions create sources of systemic risk for the broader financial system. We describe elements of monitoring risks in the shadow banking system, including recent efforts by the Financial Stability Board.