A systemic risk assessment of OTC derivatives reforms and skin‑in‑the‑game for CCPs
The G20 OTC (over-the-counter) derivatives reforms impose large collateral/liquidity demands on clearing members of Central Counterparty (CCP) clearing platforms in the form of initial margins, variation margins and contributions to the default fund. In Heath et al. (2016), it was shown how this introduces a trade-off between liquidity risk and solvency risk with the system manifesting considerable systemic risk from these two sources of risk while CCP penetration is at current levels. The authors extend this analysis to include the European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR) skin-in-the-game requirements for CCPs, which aim to ameliorate the contributions to the default fund by cleari…
Marginal contribution, reciprocity and equity in segregated groups: Bounded rationality and selforganization in social networks
We study the formation of social networks that are based on local interaction and simple rule following. Agents evaluate the profitability of link formation on the basis of the Myerson-Shapley principle that payoffs come from the marginal contribution they make to coalitions. The NP-hard problem associated with the Myerson-Shapley value is replaced by a boundedly rational 'spatially' myopic process. Agents consider payoffs from direct links with their neighbours (level 1), which can include indirect payoffs from neighbours' neighbours (level 2) and up to M-levels that are far from global. Agents dynamically break away from the neighbour to whom they make the least marginal contribution. Com…
Fair immunization and network topology of complex financial ecosystems
The aftermath of the recent financial crisis has shown how expensive and unfair the stabilization of financial ecosystems can be. The main cause is the level of complexity of financial interactions that poses a problem for regulators. We provide an analytical framework that decomposes complex ecosystems in both their overall level of instability and the contribution of institutions to instability. These ingredients are then used to study the pathways of the ecosystems towards stability by means of immunization schemes. The latter can be designed to penalize institutions proportionally to their contribution to instability, and therefore enhance fairness. We show that fair immunization scheme…
The impact of quantitative easing on UK bank lending: Why banks do not lend to businesses?
Abstract The growing proportion of UK bank lending to the financial sector reached a peak in 2007 just before the onset of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). This marks a trend in the dwindling amount of bank lending to private sector non-financial corporations (PNFCs), which was exacerbated with the Great Recession. Many central banks aimed to revive bank lending with quantitative easing (QE) and unconventional monetary policy. We propose an agent based computational economics (ACE) model which combines the main factors in the economic environment of QE and Basel regulatory framework to analyse why UK banks do not prioritize lending to non-financial businesses. The lower bond yields caused…
Multi-Agent Financial Network (MAFN) Model of US Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO)
A database driven multi-agent model has been developed with automated access to US bank level FDIC Call Reports that yield data on balance sheet and off balance sheet activity, respectively, in Residential Mortgage Backed Securities (RMBS) and Credit Default Swaps (CDS). The simultaneous accumulation of RMBS assets on US banks’ balance sheets and also large counterparty exposures from CDS positions characterized the $2 trillion Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO) market. The latter imploded at the end of 2007 with large scale systemic risk consequences. Based on US FDIC bank data, that could have been available to the regulator at the time, the authors investigate how a CDS negative carry …
‘Too interconnected to fail’ financial network of US CDS market: Topological fragility and systemic risk
A small segment of credit default swaps (CDS) on residential mortgage backed securities (RMBS) stand implicated in the 2007 financial crisis. The dominance of a few big players in the chains of insurance and reinsurance for CDS credit risk mitigation for banks' assets has led to the idea of too interconnected to fail (TITF) resulting, as in the case of AIG, of a tax payer bailout. We provide an empirical reconstruction of the US CDS network based on the FDIC Call Reports for off balance sheet bank data for the 4th quarter in 2007 and 2008. The propagation of financial contagion in networks with dense clustering which reflects high concentration or localization of exposures between few parti…