162 posts on "Banks"
November 22, 2024
Why Do Banks Fail? The Predictability of Bank Failures
Can bank failures be predicted before they happen? In a previous post, we established three facts about failing banks that indicated that failing banks experience deteriorating fundamentals many years ahead of their failure and across a broad range of institutional settings. In this post, we document that bank failures are remarkably predictable based on simple accounting metrics from publicly available financial statements that measure a bank’s insolvency risk and funding vulnerabilities.
November 21, 2024
Why Do Banks Fail? Three Facts About Failing Banks
Why do banks fail? In a new working paper, we study more than 5,000 bank failures in the U.S. from 1865 to the present to understand whether failures are primarily caused by bank runs or by deteriorating solvency. In this first of three posts, we document that failing banks are characterized by rising asset losses, deteriorating solvency, and an increasing reliance on expensive noncore funding. Further, we find that problems in failing banks are often the consequence of rapid asset growth in the preceding decade.
September 25, 2024
Flood Risk Outside Flood Zones — A Look at Mortgage Lending in Risky Areas
In support of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) creates flood maps that indicate areas with high flood risk, where mortgage applicants must buy flood insurance. The effects of flood insurance mandates were discussed in detail in a prior blog series. In 2021 alone, more than $200 billion worth of mortgages were originated in areas covered by a flood map. However, these maps are discrete, whereas the underlying flood risk may be continuous, and they are sometimes outdated. As a result, official flood maps may not fully capture the true flood risk an area faces. In this post, we make use of unique property-level mortgage data and find that in 2021, mortgages worth over $600 billion were originated in areas with high flood risk but no flood map. We examine what types of lenders are aware of this “unmapped” flood risk and how they adjust their lending practices. We find that—on average—lenders are more reluctant to lend in these unmapped yet risky regions. Those that do, such as nonbanks, are more aggressive at securitizing and selling off risky loans.
August 12, 2024
Reallocating Liquidity to Resolve a Crisis
Shortly after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in March 2023, a consortium of eleven large U.S. financial institutions deposited $30 billion into First Republic Bank to bolster its liquidity and assuage panic among uninsured depositors. In the end, however, First Republic Bank did not survive, raising the question of whether a reallocation of liquidity among financial institutions can ever reduce the need for central bank balance sheet expansion in the fight against bank runs. We explore this question in this post, based on a recent working paper.
June 20, 2024
The Growing Risk of Spillovers and Spillbacks in the Bank‑NBFI Nexus
Nonbank financial institutions (NBFIs) are growing, but banks support that growth via funding and liquidity insurance. The transformation of activities and risks from banks to a bank-NBFI nexus may have benefits in normal states of the world, as it may result in overall growth in (especially, credit) markets and widen access to a wide range of financial services, but the system may be disproportionately exposed to financial and economic instability when aggregate tail risk materializes. In this post, we consider the systemic implications of the observed build-up of bank-NBFI connections associated with the growth of NBFIs.
June 18, 2024
Banks and Nonbanks Are Not Separate, but Interwoven
In our previous post, we documented the significant growth of nonbank financial institutions (NBFIs) over the past decade, but also argued for and showed evidence of NBFIs’ dependence on banks for funding and liquidity support. In this post, we explain that the observed growth of NBFIs reflects banks optimally changing their business models in response to factors such as regulation, rather than banks stepping away from lending and risky activities and being substituted by NBFIs. The enduring bank-NBFI nexus is best understood as an ever-evolving transformation of risks that were hitherto with banks but are now being repackaged between banks and NBFIs.
May 21, 2024
The Changing Landscape of Corporate Credit
Firms’ access to credit is a crucial determinant of their investment, employment, and overall growth decisions. While we usually think of their ability to borrow as determined by aggregate credit conditions, in reality firms have a number of markets where they can borrow, and conditions can vary across those markets. In this post, we investigate how the composition of debt instruments on U.S. firms’ balance sheets has evolved over the last twenty years.
April 15, 2024
Can I Speak to Your Supervisor? The Importance of Bank Supervision
In March of 2023, the U.S. banking industry experienced a period of significant turmoil involving runs on several banks and heightened concerns about contagion. While many factors contributed to these events—including poor risk management, lapses in firm governance, outsized exposures to interest rate risk, and unrecognized vulnerabilities from interconnected depositor bases, the role of bank supervisors came under particular scrutiny. Questions were raised about why supervisors did not intervene more forcefully before problems arose. In response, supervisory agencies, including the Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, commissioned reviews that examined how supervisors’ actions might have contributed to, or mitigated, the failures. The reviews highlighted the important role that bank supervisors can play in fostering a stable banking system. In this post, we draw on our recent paper providing a critical review and summary of the empirical and theoretical literature on bank supervision to highlight what that literature tells us about the impact of supervision on supervised banks, on the banking industry and on the broader economy.
Posted at 7:00 am in Bank Capital, Banks, Federal Reserve, Financial Institutions, Regulation | Permalink
April 8, 2024
Internal Liquidity’s Value in a Financial Crisis
A classic question for U.S. financial firms is whether to organize themselves as entities that are affiliated with a bank-holding company (BHC). This affiliation brings benefits, such as access to liquidity from other affiliated entities, as well as costs, particularly a larger regulatory burden. This post highlights the results from a recent Staff Report that sheds light on this tradeoff. This work uses confidential data on the population of broker-dealers to study the benefits of being affiliated with a BHC, with a focus on the global financial crisis (GFC). The analysis reveals that affiliation with a BHC makes broker-dealers more resilient to the aggregate liquidity shocks that prevailed during the GFC. This results in these broker-dealers being more willing to hold riskier securities on their balance sheet relative to broker-dealers that are not affiliated with a BHC.
April 1, 2024
Learning by Bouncing: Overdraft Experience and Salience
Overdraft credit, when banks and credit unions allow customers to spend more than their checking account holds, has many critics. One fundamental concern is whether overdrafts are salient—whether account holders know how often they overdraw and how much it costs them. To shed light on this question, we asked participants in the New York Fed’s Survey of Consumer Expectations about their experience with and knowledge of their banks’ overdraft programs. The large majority knew how often they overdrew their account and by how much. Their overdraft experience, we find, begets knowledge; of respondents who overdrew their account in the previous year, 84 percent knew the fee they were charged, roughly twice the share for other respondents. However, even experienced overdrafters were relatively unaware of other overdraft terms and practices, such as the maximum overdraft allowed or whether their financial institution processed larger transactions first.
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