Reverse stress tests can be a useful tool to evaluate bank resilience to a credit shock, especially in environments where financial data are limited or opaque. This paper develops a simple and transparent country-level banking sector resilience indicator that focuses on tail risks, the Consolidated Distance to Breakpoint. Based on individual bank reverse stress test results, this novel metric quantifies the increase in nonperforming loans needed to deplete capital buffers for a subset of the most fragile banks that collectively represent at least 20 percent of total banking system assets, a level commonly associated with a systemic banking crisis. The paper calculates the Consolidated Distance to Breakpoint using public data for more than 1,500 banks in 59 emerging market and developing economies during the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper explores the value added of this metric in relation to widely used country-level macro-financial and soundness indicators. The results show that the association of the Consolidated Distance to Breakpoint with these macro-financial and financial soundness indicators is limited. This suggests that this new indicator encapsulates complementary information, possibly because aggregate measures may obscure challenges in individual banks. As such, the Consolidated Distance to Breakpoint metric could serve as a useful input to establish a basic understanding of a banking sector's resilience.

The banking industry plays a critical role in ensuring global economic and financial stability. Effective governance is essential for mitigating bank risk-taking and limiting managerial opportunism in this industry, which is constantly under regulatory and market scrutiny. However, the complexity and diversity of banking financial instruments and transactions gives rise to substantial information asymmetries and ongoing debates regarding contemporary governance, sustainability, and data innovation issues.This book is one of the first to address these contemporary issues collectively, offering a comprehensive and holistic understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing the global banking industry. It provides new insights, evidence-based recommendations, and future perspectives on the role of governance mechanisms, digital innovation, climate change, and green finance in shaping the industry pre- and post-COVID-19. The book is a valuable resource for a wide range of stakeholders in the banking sector, including international regulators, practitioners, policymakers, institutional investors, and auditors. It features contributions from renowned international scholars and offers a variety of theoretical, empirical, and policy-based perspectives. It provides updated evidence and new insights crucial for rethinking the global banking model and dominant regulations, and offers evidence-based recommendations and measures for promoting financial stability and resilience in this industry.

This paper explains specifics of stress testing at the IMF. After a brief section on the evolution of stress tests at the IMF, the paper presents the key steps of an IMF staff stress test. They are followed by a discussion on how IMF staff uses stress tests results for policy advice. The paper concludes by identifying remaining challenges to make stress tests more useful for the monitoring of financial stability and an overview of IMF staff work program in that direction. Stress tests help assess the resilience of financial systems in IMF member countries and underpin policy advice to preserve or restore financial stability. This assessment and advice are mainly provided through the Financial Sector Assessment Program (FSAP). IMF staff also provide technical assistance in stress testing to many its member countries. An IMF macroprudential stress test is a methodology to assess financial vulnerabilities that can trigger systemic risk and the need of systemwide mitigating measures. The definition of systemic risk as used by the IMF is relevant to understanding the role of its stress tests as tools for financial surveillance and the IMF’s current work program. IMF stress tests primarily apply to depository intermediaries, and, systemically important banks.

In contrast to non-financial firms, banks have undergone significant turbulence in the past decade, enduring severe financial crises and unprecedented regulatory reforms. New regulations, including heightened capital and liquidity requirements, measures to address regulatory migration, resolution authority, stress testing, and capital planning, have spurred the development of new tools to manage institutional failure. The primary goal has been to reduce the likelihood of poor performance and improve stock market valuations to restore public confidence in the industry. The banking industry plays a vital role in global economic and financial stability and is subject to intense regulatory and market scrutiny. Financial instability can be very costly for banks due to its spillover effects on other parts of the economy. Therefore, a sound, stable, and healthy financial system is essential for efficient resource allocation and risk distribution across the economy.This is the first book that comprehensively addresses a range of contemporary issues in the global banking industry, providing a thorough understanding of the challenges and opportunities faced by the sector. The book examines how banking business models, effective policies, and regulations can address these issues, covering corporate governance, asset-liability management, risk management, financial performance, and regulatory frameworks. The potential benefits of alternative banking models, including Islamic banking, and their contribution to global financial stability and resilience are also explored.Contributions from international scholars using both quantitative and qualitative methods provide new insights, recent findings, and perspectives on future bank stability and resilience in a global context. The book also presents updated evidence and debates on the impact of recent regulations and governance structures on the industry, which has undergone significant changes in response to financial turmoil and new laws and regulations aimed at enhancing bank resiliency, protecting against systematic risks, and promoting fair and ethical banking practices.

Little progress has been made so far in addressing—in a comprehensive way—the externalities caused by impact of the interconnectedness within institutions and markets on funding and market liquidity risk within financial systems. The Systemic Risk-adjusted Liquidity (SRL) model combines option pricing with market information and balance sheet data to generate a probabilistic measure of the frequency and severity of multiple entities experiencing a joint liquidity event. It links a firm’s maturity mismatch between assets and liabilities impacting the stability of its funding with those characteristics of other firms, subject to individual changes in risk profiles and common changes in market conditions. This approach can then be used (i) to quantify an individual institution’s time-varying contribution to system-wide liquidity shortfalls and (ii) to price liquidity risk within a macroprudential framework that, if used to motivate a capital charge or insurance premia, provides incentives for liquidity managers to internalize the systemic risk of their decisions. The model can also accommodate a stress testing approach for institution-specific and/or general funding shocks that generate estimates of systemic liquidity risk (and associated charges) under adverse scenarios.

In this paper we identify some of the main factors behind systemic risk in a set of international large-scale complex banks using the novel CoVaR approach. We find that short-term wholesale funding is a key determinant in triggering systemic risk episodes. In contrast, we find no evidence that a larger size increases systemic risk within the class of large global banks. We also show that the sensitivity of system-wide risk to an individual bank is asymmetric across episodes of positive and negative asset returns. Since short-term wholesale funding emerges as the most relevant systemic factor, our results support the Basel Committee's proposal to introduce a net stable funding ratio, penalizing excessive exposure to liquidity risk.