The regulatory reforms that followed the financial crisis of 2007-09 created a financial system that is far more resilient than the one in place 15 years ago. Yet, the events of March 2023 make clear that the progress thus far is simply not enough. To ensure resilience, we need to do more.
To steer the process of further reform, we propose a set of 10 precepts that those who make the rules should keep in mind as they refine the prudential framework. These practical guidelines lead us to conclusions that mirror those in a recent post: regulation should be more rule-based (less reliant on supervisory insight or discretion); simpler and more transparent; stricter and more rigorous; and more efficient in its use of resources. Concretely, this approach means increasing capital and liquidity requirements; shifting to mark-to-market accounting; and improving the transparency, flexibility and severity of capital and liquidity stress tests.
Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan’s recent plea for increased coordination is merely the latest protest by emerging-market economy (EME) policymakers about the spillovers from advanced-economy (AE) monetary policy. Such complaints have been common since AE central banks first implemented unconventional policies in 2008. The most famous was Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega’s September 2010 remark that “We’re in the midst of an international currency war.”
The targets of these comments—policymakers in Europe, Japan and the United States—responded that the world would be better off if their economies grew. A deeper recession in the advanced world was surely in no one’s interest. Extraordinary monetary policy easing was therefore justified by both domestic and global concerns. U.S. and European policymakers further defended their actions by saying that their mandate was to promote price stability and sustainable growth domestically, which required taking account of the external impact of their policies only insofar as they then fed back onto their own economies. That is, while spillovers per se were not their responsibility, spillbacks were.
Debates over the potential benefits from international policy coordination have a long history...
The debate over the appropriate level for a central bank’s inflation objective reminds us of a 40-year-old Sherlock Holmes movie called “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution.” Convinced that Holmes’ addiction to cocaine (the solution in the title) had made him delusional, Watson took the master sleuth to Vienna to be treated by Sigmund Freud.
Has the 2% solution for inflation targeting in advanced economies made central bankers similarly delusional? Are they stubbornly attached to an outdated target? That argument gained ground in recent years as policymakers in Europe, Japan, and the United States struggled to stimulate weak economies and stabilize prices with policy interest rates stuck at the zero bound...
A central lesson of the 2007-09 financial crisis is that we should be much more worried about financial intermediation performed outside the banking system. Even if banks are resilient, with capital buffers sufficient to withstand all but the largest shocks, other parts of the financial system can make it fragile. Indeed, making the banks safe may simply shift risk-taking elsewhere...
Over the past few years, there has been frequent talk about the need for international coordination of monetary policies. In particular, central bankers outside the United States have urged the Federal Reserve to consider the impact of its policies on emerging market economies.
