This report examines the interplay between banking competition and financial stability, taking into account the experiences in the recent global crisis and the policy response to it. The report has been prepared by members of the Directorate of ...

In this monograph, we review three branches of theoretical literature on financial crises. The first deals with banking crises originating from coordination failures among bank creditors. The second deals with frictions in credit and interbank markets due to problems of moral hazard and adverse selection. The third deals with currency crises. We discuss the evolutions of these branches in the literature, and how they have been integrated recently to explain the turmoil in the world economy during the East Asian crises and in the last few years. We discuss the relation of the models to the empirical evidence and their ability to guide policies to avoid or mitigate future crises.

Why stable banking systems are so rare Why are banking systems unstable in so many countries—but not in others? The United States has had twelve systemic banking crises since 1840, while Canada has had none. The banking systems of Mexico and Brazil have not only been crisis prone but have provided miniscule amounts of credit to business enterprises and households. Analyzing the political and banking history of the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil through several centuries, Fragile by Design demonstrates that chronic banking crises and scarce credit are not accidents. Calomiris and Haber combine political history and economics to examine how coalitions of politicians, bankers, and other interest groups form, why they endure, and how they generate policies that determine who gets to be a banker, who has access to credit, and who pays for bank bailouts and rescues. Fragile by Design is a revealing exploration of the ways that politics inevitably intrudes into bank regulation.

We study bank portfolio allocations during the transition of the real sector to a knowledge economy in which firms use less tangible capital and invest more in intangible assets. We show that, as firms shift toward intangible assets that have lower collateral values, banks reallocate their portfolios away from commercial loans toward other assets, primarily residential real estate loans and liquid assets. This effect is more pronounced for large and less well capitalized banks and is robust to controlling for real estate loan demand. Our results suggest that increased firm investment in intangible assets can explain up to 20% of bank portfolio reallocation from commercial to residential lending over the last four decades.

Provides an in-depth overview of the Federal Reserve System, including information about monetary policy and the economy, the Federal Reserve in the international sphere, supervision and regulation, consumer and community affairs and services offered by Reserve Banks. Contains several appendixes, including a brief explanation of Federal Reserve regulations, a glossary of terms, and a list of additional publications.