COVID-19: Financial Stability and Business Continuity Management – Part A

In many conference speeches, training presentations and papers since the end of the Great Financial Crisis, we often heard or read that “we don’t know when or from where the next crisis will come, but it will surely come.” It is too early to say that COVID-19 is or will precipitate another large scale global […]

Job-to-job transitions: A different lens for understanding wage dynamics

Since the global financial crisis, a number of central banks have been undershooting their inflation targets. Over this period labour markets have tightened steadily in many countries with unemployment rates reaching record lows. At the same time, wage growth has remained weak by historical standards. Some researchers argued that the Phillips curve, the main paradigm […]

Coronavirus and the Global Economy: Central Banks’ Policy Responses

Since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) in China, central bankers and policymakers have kept a very sharp eye on the health of the global economy. In some cases, Covid-19 has been compared to SARS in 2003, which some economists estimate cost the global economy $45 billion. At that time China only represented 8% […]

Credit where credit is due: calculating credit-to-GDP gaps

In the wake of the Great Financial Crisis, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) argued for counter-cyclical capital buffers and published operational guidelines (BCBS 2010) for regulators.  The cornerstone of the BCBS proposal was the use of cyclical movements in the credit-to-GDP ratio gap to trigger increases in the capital required to be held […]

Unchartered Vulnerabilities: Corporate Leveraged Loans and Collateralised Loan Obligations

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008-09, accommodative monetary policy, mainly through unconventional means, provided liquidity support which eased financial conditions in the crisis-hit economies of the U.S. and Europe.  But the low interest rate environment has encouraged greater risk-taking among corporates and non-bank financial institutions resulting in a build-up of corporate […]

Scary Spear-Phishing Attack

On Wednesday, November 27, 2019 I experienced a scary spear-phishing cyber attack. Emotionally I was humiliated. I felt extremely vulnerable and violated. I felt helpless and deeply incapacitated. What is a spear-phishing attack? According to www.kaspersky.com, spear phishing is an email or electronic communication scam targeted towards a specific individual, organization or business. The purpose […]

A New Tool to Measure a Bank’s Risk of Failure

A recent paper argues that despite the revisions to the Basel capital framework (Basel III/IV), the fundamental flaw in the underlying methodology used for calculating the amount of capital a bank should hold remains, and that the true risks the bank may be subject to continue to go undetected. Entitled “ELPR: A New Approach to […]

The Beginning of the End for the Dollar?

The weakening of the dollar and the end of its dominance of the global financial system has alternately been predicted and appealed for over many years. Yet the fact that this is now being publicly called for by a member of the establishment, indeed by no less than the Governor of the Bank of England […]