Search Results
Journal Article
How Do Banks Build Equity Capital?
This article examines the evolution of equity capital in the U.S. banking industry over the past thirty-five years. Earnings are the major driver of increases in equity capital in the banking industry. While common stock issuance is frequent, amounts issued are generally small and do not contribute meaningfully to equity capital growth in most cases. Common stock dividends and repurchases are significant drains on equity capital. It is not uncommon for banks to pay out more than they earn, reflecting both capital planning motivations and negative shocks to earnings. It is also common for ...
Report
Bank Economic Capital
Conventional measures of bank solvency fail to account for the unique liquidity risks posed by deposits. Using public regulatory data, we develop a novel measure, economic capital, that jointly quantifies the impact of credit, liquidity, and market risk. We validate that economic capital is a more timely and accurate indicator of bank health than standard solvency measures. Using our framework, we examine the evolution of banking sector solvency and find that following the GFC low interest rates depressed economic capital even as liquidity and market risks grew. We conclude with several ...
Working Paper
Are Banks' Internal Risk Parameters Consistent? Evidence from Syndicated Loans
This paper examines consistency in the estimates of probability of default (PD) and loss given default (LGD) that nine large U.S. banks assign to syndicated loans for regulatory capital purposes. Using internal bank data on loans that had PDs and LGDs assigned by more than one bank, we find substantial dispersion in these parameters. Banks differ substantially in PDs, but only a few set PDs systematically higher or lower than the median bank. However, many banks differ from the median bank systematically in LGDs, and these differences affect their Basel II minimum regulatory capital ...
Discussion Paper
Banking System Vulnerability: 2024 Update
After a period of relative stability, a series of bank failures in 2023 renewed questions about the fragility of the banking system. As in previous years, we provide in this post an update of four analytical models aimed at capturing different aspects of the vulnerability of the U.S. banking system using data through 2024:Q2 and discuss how these measures have changed since last year.
Journal Article
The Implications of Unrealized Losses for Banks
nterest rates have risen across the yield curve since the Federal Open Market Committee began tightening monetary policy in March 2022. After amassing securities during the pandemic, commercial banks saw rising interest rates erode the value of their securities portfolios by nearly $600 billion, or about 30 percent of their capital holdings. In some cases, declines in valuation of securities holdings in response to interest rate changes—known as “unrealized losses”—can mechanically reduce key regulatory capital and liquidity ratios. Should banks need to sell the securities to generate ...
Journal Article
US Bank Capital Regulation: History and Changes Since the Financial Crisis
Following the financial crisis of 2007-08, capital requirements were revised along a number of important dimensions with the intent of shoring up the banking system and reducing the likelihood of another crisis. Changes included new measures of capital and increased minimum requirements, with special emphasis on requirements for the largest and most systemically important banks. In this article, I survey the history of bank capital requirements and review the new capital rules.
Discussion Paper
CCAR: More than a Stress Test
The Federal Reserve recently released the results of its latest stress test of large bank holding companies (BHCs). While the stress test results have received a lot of attention, they are just one part of a much larger effort by the Federal Reserve to ensure that these large BHCs have robust processes for determining how much capital they need to maintain access to funding and continue to serve as credit intermediaries, even under stressed conditions. In this post, I describe these larger efforts and the role that the stress test plays in them.
Speech
Taking Stock of the Economic Recovery and the Opportunities to Bolster Financial Stability
It seems likely that the economy will grow rapidly this year. This should reduce the slack in the labor markets and eventually return inflation to the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target. Assuming virus variants do not become especially problematic, we should see an unusually strong post-recession recovery. While the near-term public health and macroeconomic improvements are more than welcome and critically important, I also believe that policymakers across the spectrum should take the time to examine some of the problems brought to the forefront over the past year. In doing so, they can ...
Report
COVID Response: The Main Street Lending Program
The Main Street Lending Program was created to support credit to small and medium-sized businesses and nonprofit organizations that were harmed by the pandemic, particularly those that were unsupported by other pandemic-response programs. It was the most direct involvement in the business loan market by the Federal Reserve since the 1930s and 1940s. Main Street operated by buying 95 percent participations in standardized loans from lenders (mostly banks) and sharing the credit risk with them. It would end up supporting loans to more than 2,400 borrowers and co-borrowers across the United ...
Discussion Paper
The CLASS Model: A Top-Down Assessment of the U.S. Banking System
Central banks and bank supervisors have increasingly relied on capital stress testing as a supervisory and macroprudential tool. Stress tests have been used by central banks and supervisors to assess the resilience of individual banking companies to adverse macroeconomic and financial market conditions as a way of gauging additional capital needs at individual firms and as a means of assessing the overall capital strength of the banking system. In this post, we describe a framework for assessing the impact of various macroeconomic scenarios on the capital and performance of the U.S. banking ...