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Speech
Opening remarks at the Conference on Supervising Large, Complex Financial Institutions: Defining Objectives and Measuring Effectiveness
Remarks at the Conference on Supervising Large, Complex Financial Institutions: Defining Objectives and Measuring Effectiveness, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, New York City.
Discussion Paper
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 ...
Discussion Paper
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 ...
Report
Where Do Banks End and NBFIs Begin?
In recent years, assets of nonbank financial intermediaries (NBFIs) have grown significantly relative to those of banks. These two sectors are commonly viewed either as operating in parallel, performing different activities, or as substitutes, performing substantially similar activities, with banks inside and NBFIs outside the perimeter of banking regulation. We argue instead that NBFI and bank businesses and risks are so interwoven that they are better described as having transformed over time, rather than as having migrated from banks to NBFIs. These transformations are at least in part a ...
Working Paper
Banker Compensation, Relative Performance, and Bank Risk
A multi-agent, moral-hazard model of a bank operating under deposit insurance and limited liability is used to analyze the connection between compensation of bank employees (below CEO) and bank risk. Limited liability with deposit insurance is a force that distorts effort down. However, the need to increase compensation to risk-averse employees in order to compensate them for extra bank risk is a force that reduces this effect. Optimal contracts use relative performance and are implementable as a wage with bonuses tied to individual and firm performance. The connection between pay for ...
Journal Article
Why Do Supervisors Rate Banking Organizations?
This article addresses a question that at first may appear simple: why do supervisors rate banking organizations? Prudential supervisors have a long-standing practice of confidentially rating the condition of the firms that they supervise. These ratings are used for a variety of purposes and can have important consequences. The authors analyze the history and evolution of this practice and consider how the use of ratings advances the statutory and regulatory goals of supervision of banking organizations. They conclude with a discussion of the implications for the design and implementation of ...
Report
Evaluating regulatory reform: banks’ cost of capital and lending
We examine the effects of regulatory changes on banks’ cost of capital and lending. Since the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act, the value-weighted CAPM cost of capital for banks has averaged 10.5 percent and declined by more than 4 percent on a within-firm basis relative to financial crisis highs. This decrease was much greater for the largest banks subject to new regulation than for other banks and firms. Over a longer twenty-year horizon, we find that changes in the systematic risk of bank equity have real economic consequences: increases in banks’ cost of capital are associated with ...
Speech
Financial Stability and Regulatory Policy in a Low Interest Rate Environment
I would suggest that the potential costs of the excessive leverage that arise in a low interest rate environment deserve more research and, I suspect, more focused and proactive policy actions.
Report
The impact of supervision on bank performance
We explore the impact of supervision on the riskiness, profitability, and growth of U.S. banks. Using data on supervisors? time use, we demonstrate that the top-ranked banks by size within a supervisory district receive more attention from supervisors, even after controlling for size, complexity, risk, and other characteristics. Using a matched sample approach, we find that these top-ranked banks that receive more supervisory attention hold less risky loan portfolios and are less volatile and less sensitive to industry downturns, but do not have slower growth or profitability. Our results ...
Discussion Paper
Fear of $10 Billion
Ten billion has become a big number in banking since the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010. When banks’ assets exceed that threshold, they face considerably heightened supervision and regulation, including exams by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, caps on interchange fees, and annual stress tests. There are plenty of anecdotes about banks avoiding the $10 billion threshold or waiting to cross with a big merger, but we’ve seen no systematic evidence of this avoidance behavior. We provide some supporting evidence below and then discuss the implications for size-based bank regulation—where ...