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Since the 2008 financial crisis, in which the Reserve Primary Fund “broke the buck,” money market funds (MMFs) have been the subject of ongoing policy debate. Many commentators view MMFs as a key contributor to the crisis because widespread redemption demands during the days following the Lehman bankruptcy contributed to a freeze in the credit markets. In response, MMFs were deemed a component of the nefarious shadow banking industry and targeted for regulatory reform. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) misguided 2014 reforms responded by potentially exacerbating MMF fragility while potentially crippling large segments of the MMF industry.
Determining the appropriate approach to MMF reform has been difficult. Banks regulators supported requiring MMFs to trade at a floating net asset value (NAV) rather than a stable $1 share price. By definition, a floating NAV prevents MMFs from breaking the buck but is unlikely to eliminate the risk of large redemptions in a time of crisis. Other reform proposals have similar shortcomings. More fundamentally, the SEC’s reforms may substantially reduce the utility of MMFs for many investors, which could, in turn, affect the availability of short term credit.
The shape of MMF reform has been influenced by a turf war among regulators as the SEC has battled with bank regulators both about the need for additional reforms and about the structure and timing of those reforms. Bank regulators have been influential in shaping the terms of the debate by using banking rhetoric to frame the narrative of MMF fragility. This rhetoric masks a critical difference between banks and MMFs – asset segregation. Unlike banks, MMF sponsors have assets and operations that are separate from the assets of the MMF itself. This difference has caused the SEC to mistake sponsor support as a weakness rather than a key stability-enhancing feature. As a result, the SEC mistakenly adopted reforms that burden sponsor support instead of encouraging it.
As this article explains, required sponsor support offers a novel and simple regulatory solution to MMF fragility. Accordingly this article proposes that the SEC require MMF sponsors explicitly to guarantee the $1 share price. Taking sponsor support out of the shadows embraces rather than ignores the advantage that MMFs offer over banks through asset partitioning. At the same time, sponsor support harnesses market discipline as a constraint against MMF risk-taking and moral hazard.
Has economic research been helpful in dealing with the financial crises of the early 2000s? On the whole, the answer is negative, although there are bright spots. Economists have largely failed to predict both crises, largely because most of them were not analytically equipped to understand them, in spite of their recurrence in the last 25 years. In the pre-crisis period, however, there have been important exceptions – theoretical and empirical strands of research that largely laid out the basis for our current thinking about financial crises. Since 2008, a flurry of new studies offered several different interpretations of the US crisis: to some extent, they point to potentially complementary factors, but disagree on their relative importance, and therefore on policy recommendations. Research on the euro debt crisis has so far been much more limited: even Europe-based researchers – including CEPR ones – have often directed their attention more to the US crisis than to that occurring on their doorstep. In terms of impact on policy and regulatory reform, the record is uneven. On the one hand, the swift and massive liquidity provision by central banks in the wake of both crises is, at least partly, to be credited to previous research on the role of central banks as lenders of last resort in crises and on the real effects of bank lending and monetary policy. On the other hand, economists have had limited impact on the reform of prudential and security market regulation. In part, this is due to their neglect of important regulatory choices, which policy-makers are therefore left to take without the guidance of academic research-based analysis.
We propose a novel approach on how to estimate systemic risk and identify its key determinants. For US financial companies with publicly traded equity options, we extract option-implied value-at-risks and measure the spillover effects between individual company value-at-risks and the option-implied value-at-risk of a financial index. First, we study the spillover effect of increasing company risks on the financial sector. Second, we analyze which companies are mostly affected if the tail risk of the financial sector increases. Key metrics such as size, leverage, market-to-book ratio and earnings have a significant influence on the systemic risk profiles of financial institutions.
This is a chapter for a forthcoming volume Oxford Handbook of Financial Regulation (Oxford University Press 2014) (eds. Eilís Ferran, Niamh Moloney, and Jennifer Payne). It provides an overview of EU financial regulation from the first banking directive up until its most recent developments in the aftermath of the financial crisis, focusing on the multiple layers of multi-level governance and their characteristic conceptual difficulties. Therefore the paper discusses the need to accommodate cross-border capital flows following from the EU internal market and the resulting regulatory strategies. This includes a brief overview of the principle of home country control and the ensuing Financial Services Action Plan. Dealing with the accommodation of cross-border capital flows and their regulation necessarily require an orchestration of the underlying supervisory structures, which is therefore also discussed. In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007-09 an additional aspect of necessary orchestration has emerged, that is the need to control systemic risk. Specific attention is paid to microprudential supervision by the newly established European Supervisory Authorities and macroprudential supervision in the European Banking Union, the latter’s underlying drivers and the accompanying Single Supervisory Mechanism, including the SSM’s institutional framework as well as the consideration of its rationales and the Single Resolution Mechanism closely linked to it.