This study provides an overview of the legal, institutional, and regulatory framework that countries should put in place to address cases of bank insolvency. It is primarily intended to inform the work of the staffs of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, and to provide guidance to their member countries.

Bringing together distinguished insolvency and banking law experts, this book provides a unique analysis of the legal issues associated with cross-border bank insolvency in the light of the financial crisis, including aspects of economics and an inter-jurisdictional approach combining national, European, and international dimensions.

High public debt often produces the drama of default and restructuring. But debt is also reduced through financial repression, a tax on bondholders and savers via negative or belowmarket real interest rates. After WWII, capital controls and regulatory restrictions created a captive audience for government debt, limiting tax-base erosion. Financial repression is most successful in liquidating debt when accompanied by inflation. For the advanced economies, real interest rates were negative 1⁄2 of the time during 1945–1980. Average annual interest expense savings for a 12—country sample range from about 1 to 5 percent of GDP for the full 1945–1980 period. We suggest that, once again, financial repression may be part of the toolkit deployed to cope with the most recent surge in public debt in advanced economies.

Financial collapses—whether of the junk bond market, the Internet bubble, or the highly leveraged housing market—are often explained as the inevitable result of market cycles: What goes up must come down. In Liquidated, Karen Ho punctures the aura of the abstract, all-powerful market to show how financial markets, and particularly booms and busts, are constructed. Through an in-depth investigation into the everyday experiences and ideologies of Wall Street investment bankers, Ho describes how a financially dominant but highly unstable market system is understood, justified, and produced through the restructuring of corporations and the larger economy. Ho, who worked at an investment bank herself, argues that bankers’ approaches to financial markets and corporate America are inseparable from the structures and strategies of their workplaces. Her ethnographic analysis of those workplaces is filled with the voices of stressed first-year associates, overworked and alienated analysts, undergraduates eager to be hired, and seasoned managing directors. Recruited from elite universities as “the best and the brightest,” investment bankers are socialized into a world of high risk and high reward. They are paid handsomely, with the understanding that they may be let go at any time. Their workplace culture and networks of privilege create the perception that job insecurity builds character, and employee liquidity results in smart, efficient business. Based on this culture of liquidity and compensation practices tied to profligate deal-making, Wall Street investment bankers reshape corporate America in their own image. Their mission is the creation of shareholder value, but Ho demonstrates that their practices and assumptions often produce crises instead. By connecting the values and actions of investment bankers to the construction of markets and the restructuring of U.S. corporations, Liquidated reveals the particular culture of Wall Street often obscured by triumphalist readings of capitalist globalization.

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.

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.

Discussing the legal mechanisms available in the EU and the United States to deal with banks and other financial institutions that are in financial distress, this book analyses the impact of the Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive looking at implementation in the UK and Germany, and uses US law as a comparative reference point.