Search Results
Briefing
Bank Failures: Solvency and Liquidity
Bank failures are almost always preceded by weak fundamentals: bad loans, low capital and/or declining earnings. Meanwhile, depositor panics, while dramatic, are rarely the root cause.Low recovery rates on failed banks' assets and examiners' postmortem assessments both point to deep insolvency, even in banks that experienced runs before failing.Deposit insurance and emergency lending alone cannot prevent crises. Policies that ensure adequate bank capital and sound risk management are essential.
Discussion Paper
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.
Discussion Paper
Using AI to Let History Speak About Bank Runs
Banking crises are commonly associated with bank runs and banking panics, yet our empirical understanding of bank runs is constrained by a lack of bank-level data. In a new paper, we use large language models (LLMs) to extract information on bank runs from millions of digitized historical newspaper pages, creating the most comprehensive database of bank runs in U.S. history. Every bank run episode that we identify is documented on a companion website where users can browse and examine individual episodes, and read the original newspaper articles. In this post, we describe how we built this ...
Working Paper
Primer on the Forward-Looking Analysis of Risk Events (FLARE) Model: A Top-Down Stress Test Model
This technical note describes the Forward-Looking Analysis of Risk Events (FLARE) model, which is a top-down model that helps assess how well the banking system is positioned to weather exogenous macroeconomic shocks. FLARE estimates banking system capital under varying macroeconomic scenarios, time horizons, and other systemic shocks.
Discussion Paper
Bank Failures: The Roles of Solvency and Liquidity
Do banks fail because of runs or because they become insolvent? Answering this question is central to understanding financial crises and designing effective financial stability policies. Long-run historical evidence reveals that the root cause of bank failures is usually insolvency. The importance of bank runs is somewhat overstated. Runs matter, but in most cases they trigger or accelerate failure at already weak banks, rather than cause otherwise sound banks to fail.
Discussion Paper
Testing Bank Resiliency Through Time
A resilient banking system meets the demands of households and businesses for financial services during both benign and severe macroeconomic and financial conditions. Banks' ability to weather severe macroeconomic shocks, and their willingness to continue providing financial services, depends on their levels of capital, balance sheet exposures, and ability to generate earnings. This note uses the Forward-Looking Analysis of Risk Events (FLARE) stress testing model to evaluate the resiliency of the banking system by consistently applying severe macroeconomic and financial shocks each quarter ...
Working Paper
Bank Failures: The Roles of Solvency and Liquidity
Bank failures can stem from runs on otherwise solvent banks or from losses that render banks insolvent, regardless of withdrawals. Disentangling the relative importance of liquidity and solvency in explaining bank failures is central to understanding financial crises and designing effective financial stability policies. This paper reviews evidence on the causes of bank failures. Bank failures — both with and without runs — are almost always related to poor fundamentals. Low recovery rates in failure suggest that most failed banks that experienced runs were likely fundamentally insolvent. ...
Discussion Paper
Inflating Away the Debt: The Debt-Inflation Channel of German Hyperinflation
The recent rise in price pressures around the world has reignited interest in understanding how inflation transmits to the real economy. Economists have long recognized that unexpected surges of inflation can redistribute wealth from creditors to debtors when debt contracts are written in nominal terms (see, for example, Fisher 1933). If debtors are financially constrained, this redistribution can affect real economic activity by relaxing financing constraints. This mechanism, which we call the debt-inflation channel, is well understood theoretically (for example, Gomes, Jermann, and Schmid ...
Report
Failing Banks
Why do banks fail? We create a panel covering most commercial banks from 1863 through 2024 to study the history of failing banks in the United States. Failing banks are characterized by rising asset losses, deteriorating solvency, and an increasing reliance on expensive noncore funding. These commonalities imply that bank failures are highly predictable using simple accounting metrics from publicly available financial statements. Failures with runs were common before deposit insurance, but these failures are strongly related to weak fundamentals, casting doubt on the importance of ...
Working Paper
Updated Primer on the Forward-Looking Analysis of Risk Events (FLARE) Model: A Top-Down Stress Test Model
This is an updated technical note describes the Forward-Looking Analysis of Risk Events (FLARE) model, which is a top-down model that helps assess how well the banking system is positioned to weather exogenous macroeconomic shocks. FLARE estimates banking system capital under varying macroeconomic scenarios, time horizons, and other systemic shocks.