Liquidity Insurance with Market Information

This paper studies how market signals—such as stock prices—can help alleviate the severity of the asymmetric information problem in credit and liquidity management. Asymmetric information hinders the ability of borrowers (firms, investment banks, etc.) to undertake profitable investment opportunities and to insure themselves against liquidity shocks. I show that on the equilibrium path creditors do not learn anything from market signals because they can use a menu of contracts to screen the different types of borrowers. However, by conditioning liquidity insurance on ex post price signals, creditors are able to provide the borrowers with better incentives for truth telling. At the same time, prices depend on the liquidity that creditors offer to the borrowers. This two-way feedback impacts the design of the optimal contract and potentially generates multiple equilibria in financial markets.

Money, Banking, and Financial Markets

The fact that money, banking, and financial markets interact in important ways seems self-evident. The theoretical nature of this interaction, however, has not been fully explored. To this end, we integrate the Diamond (1997, Journal of Political Economy105, 928–956) model of banking and financial markets with the Lagos and Wright (2005, Journal of Political Economy113, 463–484) dynamic model of monetary exchange—a union that bears a framework in which fractional reserve banks emerge in equilibrium, where bank assets are funded with liabilities made demandable in government money, where the terms of bank deposit contracts are affected by the liquidity insurance available in financial markets, where banks are subject to runs, and where a central bank has a meaningful role to play, both in terms of inflation policy and as a lender of last resort. Among other things, the model provides a rationale for nominal deposit contracts combined with a central bank lender-of-last-resort facility to promote efficient liquidity insurance and a panic-free banking system.

A NOTE ON CREDIT RISK TRANSFER AND THE MACROECONOMY

The recent financial crisis highlighted the limits of the originate to distribute model of banking, but its nexus with the macroeconomy remains unexplored. I build a business cycle model with banks engaging in credit risk transfer (CRT) under informational externalities. Markets for CRT provide liquidity insurance to banks, but the emergence of a pooling equilibrium can also impair the banks' monitoring incentives. In normal times and in face of standard macro shocks the insurance benefits of CRT prevail and the business cycle is stabilized. In face of financial/liquidity shocks the extent of informational asymmetries is larger and the business cycle is amplified. The macro model with CRT can also reproduce well a number of macro and banking statistics over the period of rapid growth of this banks' business model.

Concluding Thoughts

This concluding chapter argues that the policy makers' vade mecum laid out in the previous chapter raises broader issues for the global monetary system. Notwithstanding the fact that some of the emerging markets may have liberalized their capital accounts prematurely, it questions whether emerging markets have further to gain from opening up, or indeed whether they would not be better off retaining restrictions on at least the riskiest forms of foreign liabilities and transactions. This is particularly pertinent since most of these countries do not enjoy the liquidity insurance provided by swap facilities let alone the reserve currency status. They are forced to self-insure through reserve accumulation, which is costly both to the country and to the international monetary system. Alternative forms of insurance could arguably yield favorable benefit–cost trade-offs, particularly if they result in a safer mix of flows that makes economies less prone to risks from changes in global push factors.