Staff Working Paper No. 747
By David Aikman, Jonathan Bridges, Anil Kashyap and Caspar Siegert
How well equipped are today’s macroprudential regimes to deal with a re-run of the factors that led to the global financial crisis? We argue that a large proportion of the fall in US GDP associated with the crisis can be explained by two factors: the fragility of financial sector - represented by the increase in leverage and reliance on short-term funding at non-bank financial intermediaries - and the build-up in indebtedness in the household sector. We describe and calibrate the policy interventions a macroprudential regulator would wish to make to address these vulnerabilities. And we compare and contrast how well placed two prominent macroprudential regulators - the US Financial Stability Oversight Council and the UK’s Financial Policy Committee - are to implement these policy actions.
Would macroprudential regulation have prevented the last crisis?