Finance Commons^™

Incorporating Macroprudential Financial Regulation Into Monetary Policy, Aaron Klein

Journal of Financial Crises

This paper proposes two insights into financial regulation and monetary policy. The first enhances understanding the relationship between them, building on the automobile metaphor that describes monetary policy: when to accelerate or brake for curves miles ahead. Enhancing the metaphor, financial markets are the transmission. In a financial crisis, markets cease to function, equivalent to a transmission shifting into neutral. This explains both monetary policy’s diminished effectiveness in stimulating the economy and why the financial crisis shock to real economic output greatly exceeded central bank forecasts.

The second insight is that both excess leverage and fundamental mispricing of asset values …

European Banking Union D: Cross-Border Resolution—Dexia Group, Rosalind Z. Wiggins, Natalia Tente, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

In September 2008, Dexia Group, SA, the world’s largest provider of public finance, experienced a sudden liquidity crisis. In response, the governments of Belgium, France, and Luxembourg provided the company a capital infusion and credit support. In February 2010, the company adopted a European Union (EU)-approved restructuring plan that required it to scale back its businesses and cease proprietary trading. In June 2011, Dexia withdrew from the government-sponsored credit support program before its expiration date, and in July, the company announced that it had passed an EU stress test. However, just three months later, Dexia wrote down its substantial position …

European Central Bank Tools And Policy Actions A: Open Market Operations, Collateral Expansion And Standing Facilities, Chase P. Ross, Rosalind Z. Wiggins, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

Beginning in August 2007, the European Central Bank (ECB) responded to market turmoil with a variety of standard and non-standard monetary policy tools. This case discusses the operational framework of the ECB’s open market operation tools and standing facilities before and during the financial crisis. Specifically, this case describes the ECB’s use of its main refinancing and longer-term refinancing operations, the expansion of collateral eligible for use in Eurosystem credit operations, and the ECB’s standing facilities, including its marginal lending and deposit facilities.

Ireland And Iceland In Crisis C: Iceland’S Landsbanki Icesave, Arwin G. Zeissler, Thomas Piontek, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

At year-end 2005, almost all of the total assets of Iceland’s banking system were concentrated in just three banks (Glitnir, Kaupthing, and Landsbanki). These banks were criticized by certain financial analysts in early 2006 for being overly dependent on wholesale funding, much of it short-term, that could easily disappear if creditors’ confidence in these banks faltered for any reason. Landsbanki, followed later by Kaupthing and then Glitnir, responded to this criticism and replaced part of their wholesale funding by using online accounts to gather deposits from individuals across Europe. In Landsbanki’s case, these new deposits were marketed under the name …

Ireland And Iceland In Crisis A: Increasing Risk In Ireland, Arwin G. Zeissler, Karen Braun-Munzinger, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

Ireland went from being the poorest member of the European Economic Community in 1973 to enjoying the second highest per-capita income among European countries by 2007. Healthy growth in the 1990s eventually gave way to a concentrated boom in property-related lending in the 2000s. The growth in the aggregate loan balances of Ireland’s six major banks greatly exceeded the growth in gross domestic product (GDP); as a result, bank loan balances grew from 1.1 times GDP in 2000 to over 2.0 times GDP by 2007. Given the small size of the domestic retail depositor base, the Irish banks increasingly funded …

Jpmorgan Chase London Whale H: Cross-Border Regulation, Arwin G. Zeissler, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

As a global financial service provider, JPMorgan Chase (JPM) is supervised by banking regulatory agencies in different countries. Bruno Iksil, the derivatives trader primarily responsible for the $6 billion trading loss in 2012, was based in JPM’s London office. This office was regulated both by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) of the United States (US) and by the Financial Services Authority (FSA), which served as the sole regulator of all financial services in the United Kingdom (UK). Banking regulators in the US and the UK have entered into agreements with one another to define basic parameters …

Jpmorgan Chase London Whale D: Risk-Management Practices, Arwin G. Zeissler, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

JPMorgan Chase (JPM) prided itself on having the best risk-management practices in the financial industry, having survived the 2007-09 financial crisis in better shape than many competitors. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon often spoke of the bank’s “fortress balance sheet.” A keen focus on risk management is vital to JPM’s longevity, as is the case with all highly leveraged financial institutions. However, the JPM Task Force that investigated the $6 billion 2012 London Whale trading loss concluded that risk-management practices at the bank’s Chief Investment Office (CIO), the unit in which the loss occurred, were given less scrutiny by senior …

Jpmorgan Chase London Whale C: Risk Limits, Metrics, And Models, Arwin G. Zeissler, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

Value at Risk (VaR) is one of the most commonly used ways to measure and monitor market risk. At JPMorgan Chase (JPM), very large derivative positions established by Bruno Iksil in the Synthetic Credit Portfolio (SCP) caused the bank’s Chief Investment Office (CIO) to exceed its VaR limit for four days in a row in January 2012. In response, the CIO changed to a new VaR model on January 30, which appeared to immediately reduce VaR by half. However, JPM soon discovered that this new VaR model had not been properly implemented and the bank went back to using the …

Jpmorgan Chase London Whale B: Derivatives Valuation, Arwin G. Zeissler, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

After consistently producing positive results through 2011, the JPMorgan Chase (JPM) traders who oversaw the bank’s Synthetic Credit Portfolio (SCP) grew alarmed by a consistent string of losses beginning in January 2012. (The SCP was maintained by JPM to help hedge default risk and was the source of the 2012 London Whale trading loss.) To minimize the losses reported to their superiors until such time that market prices hopefully turned in their favor, the SCP traders began valuing their largest derivative positions in a manner that was not consistent with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) and JPM policy. The fair …

Jpmorgan Chase London Whale A: Risky Business, Arwin G. Zeissler, Daisuke Ikeda, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

In December 2011, the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer of JPMorgan Chase (JPM) instructed the bank’s Chief Investment Office to reduce the size of its Synthetic Credit Portfolio (SCP) during 2012, so that JPM could decrease its RiskWeighted Assets as the bank prepared to adopt the impending Basel III bank capital regulations. However, the SCP traders were also told to minimize the trading costs incurred to reduce Risk-Weighted Assets, while still maintaining the opportunity to profit from unexpected corporate bankruptcies. In an attempt to balance these competing objectives, head SCP derivatives trader Bruno Iksil suggested in January 2012 …

The Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program: A Systemwide Systemic Risk Exception, Lee Davison

Journal of Financial Crises

In the fall of 2008, short-term credit markets were all but frozen, creating liquidity issues for banks and bank holding companies that could not rollover their debt at reasonable rates. Fearing that the situation would worsen if something was not done, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Federal Reserve Board invoked, and the Secretary of the Treasury approved, the use of the “systemic risk exception” (SRE) under the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act of 1991, to provide unprecedented broad-based relief to struggling banks. The SRE permitted the FDIC to depart from its “least-cost” requirement when addressing failing …

The Lehman Brothers Bankruptcy D: The Role Of Ernst & Young, Rosalind Z. Wiggins, Rosalind L. Bennett, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

For many years prior to its demise, Lehman Brothers employed Ernst & Young (EY) as the firm’s independent auditors to review its financial statements and express an opinion as to whether they fairly represented the company’s financial position. EY was supposed to try to detect fraud, determine whether a matter should be publicly disclosed, and communicate certain issues to Lehman’s Board audit committee. After Lehman filed for bankruptcy, it was discovered that the firm had employed questionable accounting with regard to an unorthodox financing transaction, Repo 105, which it used to make its results appear better than they were. EY …

The Lehman Brothers Bankruptcy A: Overview, Rosalind Z. Wiggins, Thomas Piontek, Andrew Metrick

Journal of Financial Crises

On September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers Holdings, Inc., the fourth-largest U.S. investment bank, sought Chapter 11 protection, initiating the largest bankruptcy proceeding in U.S. history. The demise of the 164-year old firm was a seminal event in the global financial crisis. Under the direction of its long-time Chief Executive Officer Richard Fuld, Lehman had been very successful pursuing a high-leverage, high-risk business model that required it to daily raise billions of dollars to fund its operations. Beginning in 2006, Lehman began to invest aggressively in real-estate-related assets and soon had significant exposures to housing and subprime mortgages, just as these …