The role of external balance sheets in the financial crisis

Our Financial Stability Papers are designed to develop new insights into risk management, to promote risk reduction policies, to improve financial crisis management planning or to report on aspects of our systemic financial stability work.
Published on 25 October 2013

Financial Stability Paper No. 24
By Yaser Al-Saffar, Wolfgang Ridinger and Simon Whitaker

Gross external balance sheets are important in explaining the incidence of the financial crisis across economies. Just as for banks, leverage of the national balance sheet was an indicator of subsequent vulnerability. Countries that also experienced strong domestic credit growth, in part fuelled by ‘savings glut’ net capital inflows, suffered particularly badly. And banks’ balance sheets were critical in the transmission mechanism: high gross external interbank debt — the ‘banking glut’ — and maturity and currency mismatches, contributed to foreign rollover risk.

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