{"id":3264,"date":"2014-12-19T08:03:10","date_gmt":"2014-12-19T13:03:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=3264"},"modified":"2014-12-19T08:03:10","modified_gmt":"2014-12-19T13:03:10","slug":"what-bank-stress-tests-dont-tell-you-about-banking-system-resilience-new-economics-foundation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=3264","title":{"rendered":"What bank stress tests don\u2019t tell you about banking system resilience | New Economics Foundation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.neweconomics.org\/blog\/entry\/what-bank-stress-tests-dont-tell-you-about-banking-system-resilience\">What bank stress tests don\u2019t tell you about banking system resilience | New Economics Foundation<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p style=\"outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 14px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; padding: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 1em 0px; border: 0px initial initial;\">The Bank of England has just released the results of its first \u2018stress test\u2019 of UK banks, designed to assess whether they have enough capital to weather a severe financial storm. While headlines have focused on the fact that the Co-operative Bank failed the test, policymakers and regulators are claiming the overall results show their reforms are working, and that the system is now more resilient against future shocks.<\/p>\n<p style=\"outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 14px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; padding: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 1em 0px; border: 0px initial initial;\">But when policymakers claim this, they\u2019re making an implicit assumption that the resilience of the system equals the sum resilience of all individual banks. They\u2019re also assuming resilience can be understood purely in terms of the size of banks\u2019 buffers against shocks, rather than their inherent tendency to generate those shocks in the first place.<\/p>\n<p style=\"outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 14px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; padding: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 1em 0px; border: 0px initial initial;\">As the financial crisis taught us, things are a lot more complicated in reality. Even if the stress tests show individual banks are now \u2018resilient\u2019 (a big if, given that Lloyds and RBS only just scraped through \u2013 and that the real impacts of any future shock are inherently uncertain), does that mean the same is true of the system as a whole? Not necessarily.<\/p>\n<p style=\"outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 14px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; padding: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 1em 0px; border: 0px initial initial;\"><strong style=\"font-weight: bold; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 14px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; border: 0px initial initial;\">We need to consider the system as a whole<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 14px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; padding: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 1em 0px; border: 0px initial initial;\">For one thing, economists are starting to learn what ecologists and engineers have known for decades: that the same components can be assembled into a more or less resilient system depending on how they\u2019re connected. Stress tests purport to show what might happen to an individual bank in a stress scenario, but they don\u2019t fully capture the ways in which that shock might rebound around the system.<\/p>\n<p style=\"outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; outline-color: initial; font-size: 14px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; padding: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 1em 0px; border: 0px initial initial;\">\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><a name=\"OLE_LINK2\"><\/a><a name=\"OLE_LINK1\"><\/a><span style=\"font-size: 13pt; font-family: LucidaGrande; color: #282828;\">&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What bank stress tests don\u2019t tell you about banking system resilience | New Economics Foundation. The Bank of England has just released the results of its first \u2018stress test\u2019 of UK banks, designed to assess whether they have enough capital to weather a severe financial storm. While headlines have focused on the fact that the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[60,61,2021],"class_list":["post-3264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-bank-stress-tests","tag-banking","tag-banking-risks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3264"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3264\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3265,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3264\/revisions\/3265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}