Agent-based modeling for benchmarking banking regulation regimes: Application for the CBDC

COVID-19 pandemic challenges the sustainability of the modern financial system. International central bankers claim that banks are solid. They have accumulated significant capital buffers. Those buffers should be further more augmented by 2027 in line with Basel III reforms. However, disregarding such a consecutive rise in the banking capital adequacy requirements, the US financial authorities undertook an unprecedented step. First time in the country history they lowered the reserve requirement to zero at the end of March 2020. Friedrich von Hayek demonstrated the fragility of the modern fractional reserve banking systems. Together with Ludwig von Mises (von Mises, 1978) he was thus able to predict the Great Depression of 1929 and explain its mechanics much in advance. Thus, we wish to utilize the agent-based modeling technique to extend von Hayek’s rationale to the previously unstudied interaction of capital adequacy and reserve requirement regulation. We find that the full reserve requirement regime even without capital adequacy regulation provides more stable financial environment than the existing one. Rise in capital adequacy adds to modern banking sustainability, but it still preserves the system remarkably fragile compared to the full reserve requirement. We also prove that capital adequacy regulation is redundant when the latter environment is in place. We discuss our findings application to the potential Central Bank Digital Currencies regulation.

Capital Adequacy Regulation

This chapter aims to provide a concise overview of the capital adequacy regulation, importance of the regulation, and evolution of the capital adequacy regulation. Bank capital executes the significant role of preventing the bank from failure and acts as a buffer against possible losses. Capital adequacy is the least amount of capital a bank has to preserve to execute the business, take advantage of profitable growth opportunities, absorb losses, and sustain the customers’ confidence on it. Several bank crises and bank defaults motivate the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision to provide a comprehensive guideline in managing bank capital. The capital adequacy regulation is an international standard to safeguard the banks through setting a risk-sensitive minimum capital requirement. The regulatory authority sets the regulatory capital, and the operating banks are required to maintain the adequate level of capital.

8. Micro-prudential regulation I

This chapter studies capital adequacy regulation, which prescribes that banks can only take certain levels of risk that are supported by adequate levels of capital. In this way, capital adequacy rules provide a form of assurance that banks with adequate levels of capital are likely able to withstand losses that may result from their risk-taking. The Basel Committee developed its first set of capital adequacy standards in the Basel I Capital Accord of 1988. It was subsequently overhauled into the Basel II Capital Accord in 2003. After the global financial crisis of 2007–9, the Basel II Accord’s shortcomings were extensively discussed and the Basel Committee introduced a package of reforms in order to plug the gaps in Basel II. The Basel III package is the most extensive suite of micro-prudential regulation reforms seen to date, as they deal with capital adequacy and a range of other micro-prudential standards.

Global Finance and Capital Adequacy Regulation: Recreating Capitalist Social Relations

The paper argues that capital adequacy regulation has served to recreate the neoliberal form of capitalist social relations. It identifies two dimensions to this process. First, the paper argues that capital adequacy regulation in historical perspective can be understood to have incentivized, facilitated, and legitimated the kind of arbitrage that allow it to proceed. Second, it argues revisions to capital adequacy requirements serve to discipline mutual and cooperative forms of finance. JEL Classification: G28, P13, P16