The banking crises in 2007-10 are not exceptional. There have been many such crises in the past in both developed countries and emerging economies. A banking crisis can be related to solvency or liquidity (or both). This book focuses on banking crisis and liquidity. This book starts from basics and gradually builds up with very few technicalities. Though the analysis is primarily theoretical, we provide a historical background, a macroeconomic perspective, and policy implications for both closed and open economies.

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, published by the U.S. Government and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in early 2011, is the official government report on the United States financial collapse and the review of major financial institutions that bankrupted and failed, or would have without help from the government. The commission and the report were implemented after Congress passed an act in 2009 to review and prevent fraudulent activity. The report details, among other things, the periods before, during, and after the crisis, what led up to it, and analyses of subprime mortgage lending, credit expansion and banking policies, the collapse of companies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the federal bailouts of Lehman and AIG. It also discusses the aftermath of the fallout and our current state. This report should be of interest to anyone concerned about the financial situation in the U.S. and around the world.THE FINANCIAL CRISIS INQUIRY COMMISSION is an independent, bi-partisan, government-appointed panel of 10 people that was created to "examine the causes, domestic and global, of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States." It was established as part of the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009. The commission consisted of private citizens with expertise in economics and finance, banking, housing, market regulation, and consumer protection. They examined and reported on "the collapse of major financial institutions that failed or would have failed if not for exceptional assistance from the government."News Dissector DANNY SCHECHTER is a journalist, blogger and filmmaker. He has been reporting on economic crises since the 1980's when he was with ABC News. His film In Debt We Trust warned of the economic meltdown in 2006. He has since written three books on the subject including Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity (Cosimo Books, 2008), and The Crime Of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big to Jail (Disinfo Books, 2011), a companion to his latest film Plunder The Crime Of Our Time. He can be reached online at www.newsdissector.com.

The global financial crisis (GFC) has renewed interest in emergency liquidity support (sometimes referred to as “Lender of Last Resort”) provided by central banks to financial institutions and challenged the traditional way of conducting these operations. Despite a vast literature on the topic, central bank approaches and practices vary considerably. In this paper we focus on, for the most part, the provision of idiosyncratic support, approaching it from an operational perspective; highlighting different approaches adopted by central banks; and also identifying some of the issues that arose during the GFC.

Bank Liquidity Creation and Financial Crises delivers a consistent, logical presentation of bank liquidity creation and addresses questions of research and policy interest that can be easily understood by readers with no advanced or specialized industry knowledge. Authors Allen Berger and Christa Bouwman examine ways to measure bank liquidity creation, how much liquidity banks create in different countries, the effects of monetary policy (including interest rate policy, lender of last resort, and quantitative easing), the effects of capital, the effects of regulatory interventions, the effects of bailouts, and much more. They also analyze bank liquidity creation in the US over the past three decades during both normal times and financial crises. Narrowing the gap between the "academic world" (focused on theories) and the "practitioner world" (dedicated to solving real-world problems), this book is a helpful new tool for evaluating a bank's performance over time and comparing it to its peer group. - Explains that bank liquidity creation is a more comprehensive measure of a bank's output than traditional measures and can also be used to measure bank liquidity - Describes how high levels of bank liquidity creation may cause or predict future financial crises - Addresses questions of research and policy interest related to bank liquidity creation around the world and provides links to websites with data and other materials to address these questions - Includes such hot-button topics as the effects of monetary policy (including interest rate policy, lender of last resort, and quantitative easing), the effects of capital, the effects of regulatory interventions, and the effects of bailouts

An IMF paper reviewing the policy responses of Indonesia, Korea and Thailand to the 1997 Asian crisis, comparing the actions of these three countries with those of Malaysia and the Philippines. Although all judgements are still tentative, important lessons can be learned from the experiences of the last two years.

This paper reviews the literature on financial crises focusing on three specific aspects. First, what are the main factors explaining financial crises? Since many theories on the sources of financial crises highlight the importance of sharp fluctuations in asset and credit markets, the paper briefly reviews theoretical and empirical studies on developments in these markets around financial crises. Second, what are the major types of financial crises? The paper focuses on the main theoretical and empirical explanations of four types of financial crises—currency crises, sudden stops, debt crises, and banking crises—and presents a survey of the literature that attempts to identify these episodes. Third, what are the real and financial sector implications of crises? The paper briefly reviews the short- and medium-run implications of crises for the real economy and financial sector. It concludes with a summary of the main lessons from the literature and future research directions.

This paper updates the IMF’s work on general principles, strategies, and techniques from an operational perspective in preparing for and managing systemic banking crises in light of the experiences and challenges faced during and since the global financial crisis. It summarizes IMF advice concerning these areas from staff of the IMF Monetary and Capital Markets Department (MCM), drawing on Executive Board Papers, IMF staff publications, and country documents (including program documents and technical assistance reports). Unless stated otherwise, the guidance is generally applicable across the IMF membership.

We update the widely used banking crises database by Laeven and Valencia (2008, 2010) with new information on recent and ongoing crises, including updated information on policy responses and outcomes (i.e. fiscal costs, output losses, and increases in public debt). We also update our dating of sovereign debt and currency crises. The database includes all systemic banking, currency, and sovereign debt crises during the period 1970-2011. The data show some striking differences in policy responses between advanced and emerging economies as well as many similarities between past and ongoing crises.

Originally written for a conference of the Federal Reserve, Gary Gorton's "The Panic of 2007" garnered enormous attention and is considered by many to be the most convincing take on the recent economic meltdown. Now, in Slapped by the Invisible Hand, Gorton builds upon this seminal work, explaining how the securitized-banking system, the nexus of financial markets and instruments unknown to most people, stands at the heart of the financial crisis. Gorton shows that the Panic of 2007 was not so different from the Panics of 1907 or of 1893, except that, in 2007, most people had never heard of the markets that were involved, didn't know how they worked, or what their purposes were. Terms like subprime mortgage, asset-backed commercial paper conduit, structured investment vehicle, credit derivative, securitization, or repo market were meaningless. In this superb volume, Gorton makes all of this crystal clear. He shows that the securitized banking system is, in fact, a real banking system, allowing institutional investors and firms to make enormous, short-term deposits. But as any banking system, it was vulnerable to a panic. Indeed the events starting in August 2007 can best be understood not as a retail panic involving individuals, but as a wholesale panic involving institutions, where large financial firms "ran" on other financial firms, making the system insolvent. An authority on banking panics, Gorton is the ideal person to explain the financial calamity of 2007. Indeed, as the crisis unfolded, he was working inside an institution that played a central role in the collapse. Thus, this book presents the unparalleled and invaluable perspective of a top scholar who was also a key insider.

We study three cases in which specialized arbitrageurs lost significant amounts of capital and, as a result, became liquidity demanders rather than providers. The effects on security markets were large and persistent: Prices dropped relative to fundamentals and the rebound took months. While multi-strategy hedge funds who were not capital constrained increased their positions, a large fraction of these funds actually acted as net sellers consistent with the view that information barriers within a firm (not just relative to outside investors) can lead to capital constraints for trading desks with mark-to-market losses. Our findings suggest that real world frictions impede arbitrage capital.