On June 28th 2012, the small island of Cyprus became the fifth government to request an economic bail-out from the Eurozone after losing access to international capital markets. Less than a year later, a €10 billion second rescue deal was agreed upon — an unprecedented agreement that bailed in creditors of Cyprus' two largest banks, and triggered an economic crisis that the nation still struggles to recover from today.This resourceful collection of essays provides a thorough and in depth analysis of how Cyprus reached the point of failure and what lessons this experience holds for future economic crises. The various perspectives collectively address unanswered questions, including whether the bail-in can be considered successful, why the recession was less severe than expected, and what conclusions can be drawn about stress-testing exercises across borders.Focusing on one of the (proportionately) largest crises in financial history, the case study will prove essential to policy-makers and politicians, especially in the euro area.

Staff Discussion Notes showcase the latest policy-related analysis and research being developed by individual IMF staff and are published to elicit comment and to further debate. These papers are generally brief and written in nontechnical language, and so are aimed at a broad audience interested in economic policy issues. This Web-only series replaced Staff Position Notes in January 2011.

Developing an effective framework for cross-border resolution is a key priority in international regulatory reform. Large bank failures during the global financial crisis brought home the lack of adequate tools for resolving “too-big-to-fail” institutions. In cross-border cases, misaligned incentives and lack of robust mechanisms for resolution and cross-border cooperation left some country authorities with little choice but to take unilateral actions, which contributed to the high fiscal costs of the crisis and resulted in disorderly resolution in some cases

The 4th Special Report in the Geneva Reports on the World Economy series reviews the current status of bail-ins and bank resolution in Europe. It first provides a critical comparison of the US and EU bank resolution rules, including the underlying similarities, differences and enhancement points of both frameworks. It then goes on to focus on European banking failures, providing estimates of taxpayer costs and considering the hypothetical application of stronger private sector bail-in consistent with the spirit of the Bank Resolution and Recovery Directive. The report ends with a number of policy recommendations concerning governance, stress testing, cross-border issues and resolution of financial contracts.

This book takes stock after a year of application of the SRM and examines the situation from various perspectives: the perspective of the SRB, the NRA, the supervised bank and judicial protection. Special attention is given to the division of power between the RB and the NRA and the impact on the supervised bank, the relationship and links between the SRM and the SSM and the query whether the right balance between national and supranational powers has been struck, also in view of the principle of subsidiarity.

Responding to lessons learned during the global financial crisis, the EU Directive on the Recovery and Resolution of Banks and Securities Firms (the BRRD) has substantially changed the legal framework for insolvency management of financial services institutions across Europe. As the legislative process has been completed with the adoption of the BRRD, and of Regulation No 806/2014 establishing the Single Resolution Mechanism, this book offers a unique insight into the new European framework for the resolution of banks in distress. The chapters in this volume take stock of what has been achieved and present an insightful analysis of both the technical framework and its impact on banking institutions and their counterparties in representative forms of banking activities, including retail and wholesale depositors, counterparties to financial directives, and the providers of relevant parts of the market infrastructure. Special attention is given to the international coordination of resolution. The book's focus is on resolution and its impact on the relationships between banks, customers, other market participants and market infrastructure, including the preventative requirements on recovery and resolution planning under the BRRD. The chapters bring together a wide range of perspectives by scholars, practitioners from regulatory authorities and other parts of the financial safety net, as well as from private practice, from many jurisdictions, and both legal and economic backgrounds. Arranged broadly in line with the structure of the BRRD, the book is a highly useful reference for practitioners, policy-makers, and academics alike.

Setting forth the building blocks of banking bailout law, this book reconstructs a regulatory framework that might better serve countries during future crisis situations. It builds upon recent, carefully selected case studies from the US, the EU, the UK, Spain and Hungary to answer the questions of what went wrong with the bank bailouts in the EU, why the US performed better in terms of crisis management, and how bailouts could be regulated and conducted more successfully in the future. Employing a comparative methodology, it examines the different bailout and bank resolution techniques and tools and identifies the pros and cons of the different legal and regulatory options and their underlying principles. In the post-2008 legal-regulatory architecture financial institution specific insolvency proceedings were further developed or implemented on both sides of the Atlantic. Ten years after the most recent financial crisis, there is sufficient empirical evidence to evaluate the outcomes of the bank bailouts in the US and the EU and to examine a number of cases under the EU’s new bank resolution regime. This book will be of interest of anyone in the field of finance, banking, central banking, monetary policy and insolvency law.