Modern bank regulation has two complementary parts: capital and liquidity requirements. The first restricts liabilities given the structure of assets and the second limits assets based on the composition of liabilities.
While capital regulation―especially in its risk-based form―is a creation of the last quarter of the 20th century, liquidity regulation is much older. In fact, the newly implemented liquidity coverage ratio (LCR) harks back to the system in place over 100 years ago. In the United States, before the advent of the Federal Reserve in 1914, both national and state-chartered banks were required to hold substantial liquid reserves to back their deposits (see Carlson). These are the reserve requirements (RR) that remain in effect in most jurisdictions today, the United States included.
In this post, we briefly examine the long experience with RR as a way to gain insight regarding the LCR. We draw two conclusions. First, we argue strongly against using the LCR as a monetary policy tool in advanced economies with well-developed financial markets. Like RR, it is simply too blunt and unpredictable. Second, for the LCR to work as a prudential policy tool, it should probably be supplemented by something like a fee-based line of credit at the central bank....
Professor Mervyn King, our friend, NYU Stern colleague and the former Governor of the Bank of England, has written a wonderfully insightful and thought-provoking new book, The End of Alchemy. His goal is not just to explain the sources of the 2007-09 crisis, but to provide a template for financial reform that would reduce the frequency and severity of future crises. In the end, Professor King proposes a radical structural change intended to make banking safe while preserving the intermediation function that is critical to modern economies.
The alchemy to which Professor King refers in his book’s title is banks’ traditional function of transforming high-risk, illiquid and long-maturity assets into low-risk, liquid and short-term liabilities. But, in the presence of limited liability for the banks’ owners and the government safety net (in the form of deposit insurance and the lender of last resort that remove both solvency and liquidity risk for the depositors), banks’ incentive is to transform too much. Holding assets that are overly risky, insufficiently liquid and too long-term makes banks fragile and run-prone, providing fodder for systemic crises....
