The Global Financial Crisis and the Financial Stability Board: Hardening the Soft Law of International Financial Regulation?

Author(s):  
Douglas W. Arner ◽  
Michael William Taylor
2020 ◽  
pp. 203-222
Author(s):  
Thomas Rixen ◽  
Lora Anne Viola

The global financial crisis led G20 states to conclude that stronger regulatory standards and improved compliance were needed to ensure global financial stability. To this end, the G20, as collective governor, granted an institutional intermediary, the Financial Stability Board (FSB), authority to develop and supervise financial market regulations. However, the G20 designed the FSB in ways that stymied its regulatory competence. Why did the G20 design the FSB in ways that were inadequate to meeting its own governance goal? Competence–control theory provides a compelling answer. The G20 faces a tradeoff between a competent intermediary and control over the intermediary; this tradeoff is exacerbated by the G20’s collective nature. While the G20 has a collective long-term interest in an intermediary with the expertise and capacity to promote stability-enhancing regulations, intense short-term distributive conflicts among member states yield strong incentives to control the intermediary. These internal distributive conflicts are more easily overcome during systemic economic crisis, when a competent intermediary is urgently needed. Once the crisis has passed, however, the governor reasserts control, again compromising the intermediary’s competence. The chapter illustrates this argument with an account of reforming the Financial Stability Forum into the FSB, and three case studies of policy reforms after the financial crisis.


2011 ◽  
Vol 216 ◽  
pp. R1-R15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erland W. Nier

There is increasing recognition that prior to the global financial crisis financial regulation had lacked a macroprudential perspective. There has since been a strong effort to make a new macroprudential orientation operational, including through the establishment of new macroprudential authorities or ‘committees’ in a number of jurisdictions. These developments raise — and this paper explores — the following three questions. First, what distinguishes macroprudential policy from microprudential policy and what are its key tasks? Second, what powers should be given to macroprudential authorities and what should be their mandate? Third, how can governance arrangements ensure that macroprudential policies are pursued effectively? While arrangements for macroprudential policy will to some extent be country-specific, we identify three basic challenges in setting up an effective macroprudential policy framework and discuss options to address them.


2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Aikman ◽  
Jonathan Bridges ◽  
Anil Kashyap ◽  
Caspar Siegert

How well equipped are today’s macroprudential regimes to deal with a rerun of the factors that led to the global financial crisis? To address the factors that made the last crisis so severe, a macroprudential regulator would need to implement policies to tackle vulnerabilities from financial system leverage, fragile funding structures, and the build-up in household indebtedness. We specify and calibrate a package of policy interventions to address these vulnerabilities—policies that include implementing the countercyclical capital buffer, requiring that banks extend the maturity of their funding, and restricting mortgage lending at high loan-to-income multiples. We then assess how well placed are two prominent macroprudential regulators, set up since the crisis, to implement such a package. The US Financial Stability Oversight Council has not been designed to implement such measures and would therefore make little difference were we to experience a rerun of the factors that preceded the last crisis. A macroprudential regulator modeled on the UK’s Financial Policy Committee stands a better chance because it has many of the necessary powers. But it too would face challenges associated with spotting build-ups in risk with sufficient prescience, acting sufficiently aggressively, and maintaining political backing for its actions.


2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-321
Author(s):  
Iris H-Y Chiu

In the wake of the global financial crisis, the trajectory of legal reforms is likely to turn towards more transparency regulation. This article argues that transparency regulation will take on a new role of surveillance as intelligence and data mining expand in the wholesale financial sector, supporting the creation of designated systemic risk oversight regulators.The role of market discipline, which has been acknowledged to be weak leading up to the financial crisis, is likely to be eclipsed by a more technocratic governance in the financial sector. In this article, however, concerns are raised about the expansion of technocratic surveillance and whether financial sector participants would internalise the discipline of regulatory control. Certain endemic features of the financial sector will pose challenges for financial regulation even in the surveillance age.


2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 687-700 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siti Raihana Hamzah ◽  
Obiyathulla Ismath Bacha ◽  
Abbas Mirakhor ◽  
Nurhafiza Abdul Kader Malim

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent of risk shifting behavior in bonds and sukuk. The examination is significant, as economists and scholars identify risk shifting as the primary cause of the global financial crisis. Yet, the dangers of this debt-financing feature are largely ignored – one needs to only witness the record growth of global debt even after the global financial crisis. Design/methodology/approach To identify the signs of risk shifting existence in the corporations, this paper compares each corporation’s operating risk before and after issuing debt. Operating risk or risk of a firm’s activities is measured using the volatility of the operating earnings or coefficient variation of earning before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA). Using EBITDA as the variable offers one distinct advantage to using asset volatility as previous research has – EBITDA can be extracted directly from firms’ accounting data and is not model-specific. Findings Risk shifting can be found in not only the bond system but also the debt-based sukuk system – a noteworthy finding because sukuk, supposedly in a different class from bonds, have been criticized in some quarters for their apparent similarity to bonds. On the other hand, this study thus shows that equity feature, when it is embedded in bonds (as in convertible bonds) or when a financial instrument is based purely on equity (as in equity-based sukuk), the incentive to shift the risk can be mitigated. Research limitations/implications Global awareness of the dangers of debt should be increased as a means of reducing the amount of debt outstanding globally. Although some regulators suggest that sukuk replace debt, they must also be aware that imitative sukuk pose the same threat to efforts to avoid debt. In short, efforts to ensure future financial stability cannot address only debts or bonds but must also address those types of sukuk that mirror bonds in their operation. In the wake of the global financial crisis, amid the frantic search for ways of protecting against future financial shocks, this analysis aims to help create future stability by encouraging market players to avoid debt-based activities. Originality/value This paper differs from the previous literature in two important ways, viewing risk shifting behavior not only in relation to debt or bonds but also when set against debt-based sukuk, which has been subjected to similar criticism. Indeed, to the extent that debts and bonds encourage risk shifting behavior and threaten the entire financial system, so, too, can imitation sukuk or debt-based sukuk. Second, this paper is unique in exploring the ability of equity features to curb equity holders’ incentive to engage in risk shifting behavior. Such an examination is necessary for the wake of the global financial crisis, for researchers and economists now agree that risk shifting must be a controlled behavior – and that one way of controlling risk shifting is by implementing the risk sharing feature of equity-based financing into the financial system.


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