Russian Sanctions: Questions and Answers

This post is authored jointly with our friend and colleague, Professor Richard Berner, Co-Director of the NYU Stern Volatility and Risk Institute.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is altering global security and economic relationships. In this post, we focus on the financial and trade sanctions imposed on Russia. These sanctions are the most powerful and costly punishments imposed on a major economy at least since the Cold War. Their speed, breadth and coordinated global support appear unprecedented.

Not surprisingly, the impact is immediately visible. The damage to the Russian economy and financial system includes, but is not limited to, a plunge of the ruble (by about 40 percent versus the dollar over the past month amid heightened volatility); runs on domestic banks; a sharp hike in the central bank’s policy rate; imposition of capital controls; shutdown of the Russian stock market; collapse in the value of Russian companies traded on foreign stock exchanges; removal of Russian equities from global indexes; and the collapse of Russia’s sovereign credit rating to junk status.

The purpose of this post is to pose and provisionally answer a series of questions raised by this new sanctions regime.…

Italeave: The Renewed Threat of a Parallel Currency

In the March 2018 general election, two Italian political parties (the League and the Five Star Movement) that eventually formed the current government campaigned against many of the structures that are the foundation of the European Union. One part of their agreed policy program, a proposal that resurfaced in the past week, concerns the possibility of issuing mini-BOTs (which stands for Buoni del Tesoro). These would be small denomination “bonds”—non-interest-bearing, tradeable securities—issued by the Italian government to pay debts and usable to pay taxes or purchase goods and services provided by the state. Printed in the size and shape of currency notes, recipients could view them as a new means of exchange.

In this post, we discuss the possibility of Italy leaving the European Monetary Union, and why there is an increased incentive for the government to plan for an abrupt and unanticipated exit. The strategic analogy is to the appearance of a first-strike capacity that undermines nuclear peace. In our view, however, that appearance is misleading: any attempt to exit would not only be a disaster for Italy, as we explained in our post from a year ago, it would be the “mother of all financial crises” ….

Managing Risk and Complexity: Legal Entity Identifier

Prior to the financial crisis, even an informed observer might have naïvely believed that the CEOs of big financial firms could simply push a button to view the current exposure of their firms to any other firms in the world. Or, if less technologically advanced, they could call their chief risk officers or chief financial officers to obtain end-of-day positions.

Not even close. By the time that Lehman failed in September 2008, large financial holding companies had evolved into extremely complex structures with hundreds or thousands of subsidiaries for which the parent companies lacked consolidated information technology and risk-management systems. The multiplicity of information systems meant that different parts of the same firm employed varying names and codes to identify the same counterparty. Fixing this, merging all of the information structures and ensuring consistency, would have been an expensive proposition that managers (compensated out of current profits) had incentive to delay.

Correcting these deficiencies in the financial infrastructure is not a trivial matter. Simplifying the problem requires the creation of a unique, universal, and permanent identification system for both institutions (financial and nonfinancial) and instruments. Realizing the nature of the opportunity and the challenge, in November 2011, the G20 called for the creation of a global legal entity identifier (LEI). Importantly, everyone realized that given the massive size of the financial system that supports both domestic and cross-border activity, the solution had to be global. (For pioneering analyses, see work by the Federal Reserve and the Office of Financial Research. For up-to-date information on the LEI, see here.)....

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Money, Banking, and Financial Markets