Macroprudential Policy – how does it differ from rate hikes?
Macroprudential policies, it is argued, are more targeted and can complement central bank’s use of interest rate policy.
CoCo issuance and bank fragility
A series of papers by Stefan Avdjiev, Bilyana Bogdanova, Patrick Bolton, Wei Jiang, and Anastasia Kartasheva on this topic is highly recommended.
Why is the Hong Kong-US interest rate spread so persistent? — Currency peg in...
A spread of over 3.5 percentage points between US and Hong Kong Interest rate persisted for close to two months and so far arbitrage has failed to close the gap, leading to discussion of whether Hong Kong's Linked Exchange System is failing. This article, however, will explore some technical factors behind this interesting interest rate gap.
Why hadn’t Federal Reserve rescued Lehman Brothers in 2008?
This week, the trio who was directly responsible for the decision to let Lehman fail – Bernanke, Tim Geithner (then New York Fed President), and Hank Paulson (then Treasury Secretary) – joined together at a panel held by Brookings Institution and spoke about the lessons they had learned from the crisis.
The sovereign-bank “doom loop”
Since the Euro crisis, investors and policymakers are well aware of the so-called "doom loop" between the banking system and the sovereign. That is, a crisis originating in the banking system (sovereign) will weaken the sovereign (banking system), which in turn will worsen the banking (sovereign) crisis itself.
In a recent ECB discussion Paper "Managing the sovereign-bank nexus", the 7 economists - Giovanni Dell’Ariccia, Caio Ferreira, Nigel Jenkinson, Luc Laeven, Alberto Martin, Camelia Minoiu, and Alexander Popov - coauthored the paper suggested that the banks and sovereigns are linked by three interacting channels:
A skeptical review of the QEs – why they might not be powerful as...
In their working paper "A Skeptical View of the Impact of the Fed's Balance Sheet," economists David Greenlaw, James D. Hamilton, Ethan Harris, and Kenneth D. West challenge some earlier studies that concluded QEs have a significant economic impact. Their major argument is that those research used simple event studies to quantify the impact of QE.
Bank Equity and Banking Crises
In a recent study "Bank Equity and Banking Crises" by Matthew Baron (of Cornell University), Emil Verner (MIT Sloan), and Wei Xiong (Princeton University), the three economists developed a comprehensive database of bank equity prices and banking crises with a full-sample of 46 countries from 1870-2016. They try to understand the dynamic between bank equity decline and banking crises.
Bank of Canada Watch
The Bank of Canada on Wednesday decided to hold policy rate at 2.25% unchanged, as expected by markets. However, what is a notable is the Bank continues to show dovish bias given the recent rebound in economic data.
How to benefit from others’ QE — Hong Kong Linked Exchange Rate’s lesson
What if I tell you, behind the boring news headline, there is actually a wonkish story about how the Hong Kong central bank took advantage of the monetary easing by the Fed in the last 12 year and created a new set of policy options that it can now use to actively mange the inflows created by the new round Fed easing under the Great Lockdown.
What is FTPL (Fiscal Theory of Price Level)?
The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level says that money has value because the government accepts it for taxes, and inflation is fundamentally a fiscal phenomenon














