Taking Credit

2017 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 640-675 ◽  
Author(s):  
John S. Ahlquist ◽  
Ben W. Ansell

Several recent studies link rising income inequality in the United States to the global financial crisis, arguing that US politicians did not respond to growing inequality with fiscal redistribution. Instead, Americans saved less and borrowed more to maintain relative consumption in the face of widening economic disparities. This article proposes a theory in which fiscal redistribution dampens the willingness of citizens to borrow to fund current consumption. A key implication is that pretax inequality will be more tightly linked with credit in less redistributive countries. The long-run partisan composition of government is, in turn, a key determinant of redistributive effort. Examining a panel of eighteen OECD democracies, the authors find that countries with limited histories of left-wing participation in government are significantly more likely see credit expansion as prefisc inequality grows compared to those in which the political left has been more influential.

2014 ◽  
Vol 05 (02) ◽  
pp. 1450002 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phakawa Jeasakul ◽  
Cheng Hoon Lim ◽  
Erik Lundback

Asia proved to be remarkably resilient in the face of the global financial crisis, but why was its output performance stronger than that of other regions? The paper shows that better initial conditions — in the form of lower external and financial vulnerabilities — contributed significantly to Asia's resilience. Key pre-crisis factors included moderate credit expansion, reliance on deposit funding, enhanced bank asset quality, reduced external financing, and improved current accounts. These improvements reflected the lessons from the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, which helped to reshape both public policies and private sector behavior. Looking ahead, Asia is in the process of adjusting to more volatile external conditions and higher risk premiums. By drawing the right lessons from its pre-crisis experiences, Asia's economies will be better equipped to address new risks associated with increased cross-border capital flows and greater integration with the rest of the world.


Author(s):  
Eleonora Cutrini ◽  
Giorgio Galeazzi

This chapter focuses on the decoupling hypothesis between emerging countries and the advanced world. On the basis of quarterly seasonally adjusted data over the period 1995q1–2014q1 we present some evidence in favor of a decreasing vulnerability of emerging market economies to global economic and financial development, particularly convincing for Asian countries. Results confirm a common finding in the related literature: The acute phase of the financial crisis triggered by the US mortgage crisis corresponds to a period of substantial increase in business cycle synchronization, arguably determined by the synchronized trade collapse and foreign credit retrenchment, although in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, all the different groups of emerging economies started to decouple again from the United States, and also relative to the Eurozone and to Japan. Therefore, extending the time span to recent data allows us to envisage the recoupling phase with respect to the United States' business cycle as a temporary halt over a long-run decoupling initiated a decade ago.


Author(s):  
Youssef Cassis

The introductory chapter provides a historical perspective to the discussion of international centres after the Global Financial Crisis and Brexit. It addresses three sets of questions. The first concerns the definition and ranking of international financial centres; the second concerns the effects, over the long run, of global financial crises on international financial centres, in terms of rise, decline, recovery, and reconfiguration; and the third concerns the ability of international financial centres to reinvent themselves in the face of new adverse conditions. The last set of questions is relevant to the likely effects of Brexit, and takes into account the fact that, historically, leading economic powers have always given rise to a major financial centre. The final part of the introduction is devoted to a presentation, against this historical background, of the eight core chapters of the book.


2016 ◽  
pp. 26-46
Author(s):  
Marcin Jan Flotyński

The global financial crisis in 2007–2009 began a period of high volatility on the financial markets. Specifically, it caused an increased amplitude of fluctuations of the level of gross domestic products, the level of investment and consumption and exchange rates in particular countries. To address the adverse market circumstances, governments and central banks took actions in order to bolster the weakening global economy. The aim of this article is to present the anti-crisis actions in the United States and selected member states of the European Union, including Poland, and an assessment of their efficiency. The analysis conducted indicates that generally the actions taken in the United States in response to the crisis were faster and more adequate to the existing circumstances than in the European Union.


Author(s):  
Steven L Schwarcz

Securitisation represents a significant worldwide source of capital market financing. European investors commonly invest in asset-backed securities issued in U.S. securitisation transactions, and vice versa One of the key goals of the European Commission's proposed Capital Markets Union (CMU) is to further facilitate securitisation as a source of capital market financing as a viable alternative to bank-based finance for companies operating in the EU. To that end, this chapter explains securitisation and attempts to put its rise, its decline after the global financial crisis, and its recent CMU-inspired revival into a global perspective. It examines not only securitisation's relationship to the financial crisis but also post-crisis comparative regulatory approaches in the EU and the United States.


SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 215824402110326
Author(s):  
Lin Liu

This paper presents new empirical evidence concerning the time-varying responses of China’s macroeconomy to U.S. economic uncertainty shocks through a novel TVP-VAR model. The results robustly reveal that a rise in U.S. economic uncertainty would exert sizable, persistent, and significant detrimental effects on China’s gross domestic product (GDP), price level, and short-term interest rate during the period when common shocks take place, such as the global financial crisis around 2008, whereas small and transient effects in the tranquil times. Therefore, China should diversify its international linkages and gradually reduce the dependence on the United States into a certain range to shield the domestic economy, as well as improve the independence of monetary policy. Furthermore, to withstand unfavorable external shocks, China should be prudent on greater opening-up and carry out more intensive intervention when common shocks hit the world economy. Finally, investors should be alert to the potential detrimental impact of U.S. economic uncertainty on Chinese assets’ fundamentals.


Author(s):  
Christoph Nitschke ◽  
Mark Rose

U.S. history is full of frequent and often devastating financial crises. They have coincided with business cycle downturns, but they have been rooted in the political design of markets. Financial crises have also drawn from changes in the underpinning cultures, knowledge systems, and ideologies of marketplace transactions. The United States’ political and economic development spawned, guided, and modified general factors in crisis causation. Broadly viewed, the reasons for financial crises have been recurrent in their form but historically specific in their configuration: causation has always revolved around relatively sudden reversals of investor perceptions of commercial growth, stock market gains, monetary availability, currency stability, and political predictability. The United States’ 19th-century financial crises, which happened in rapid succession, are best described as disturbances tied to market making, nation building, and empire creation. Ongoing changes in America’s financial system aided rapid national growth through the efficient distribution of credit to a spatially and organizationally changing economy. But complex political processes—whether Western expansion, the development of incorporation laws, or the nation’s foreign relations—also underlay the easy availability of credit. The relationship between systemic instability and ideas and ideals of economic growth, politically enacted, was then mirrored in the 19th century. Following the “Golden Age” of crash-free capitalism in the two decades after the Second World War, the recurrence of financial crises in American history coincided with the dominance of the market in statecraft. Banking and other crises were a product of political economy. The Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2008 not only once again changed the regulatory environment in an attempt to correct past mistakes, but also considerably broadened the discursive situation of financial crises as academic topics.


Bankarstvo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 9-41
Author(s):  
Radovan Kovačević

The Western Balkans (WB) countries registered an increase in the current account (CA) deficit and net capital inflow in the period before the outbreak of the global financial crisis of 2008. The external debt of these countries has increased. The aim of this paper is to examine the causality relationship between the CA and financial accounts (FA) balance of Serbia. A framework for the empirical analysis is the vector autoregression (VAR) model and the vector error correction (VEC) model. Using the Johansen cointegration test, we find the existence of a long-run causality relationship between these two variables. The estimated long-run coefficient on the FA variable as an independent variable shows that an increase of Serbia's FA balance by 1% leads to an increase in the CA deficit of Serbia by 0.58%. Applying the Granger causality test, it was found that causality runs from FA to the CA, which implies recommendations for economic policymakers. The finding indicates the need to continuously check the sustainability of the CA deficit of Serbia, as well as to monitor the level of presence of foreign capital in the Serbian economy.


2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 677-687
Author(s):  
Sam Ngwenya

The global financial crisis of 2008 that resulted in the collapse of many financial institutions in the United States (US) and Europe have resulted in debates over the failures of corporate governance structures to properly protect investors. The main objective of the study was to determine the relationship between corporate governance and performance of listed commercial banks in South Africa. The results of the study indicated a statistically positive significant relationship between board size, proportion of non-independent and non-executive directors and bank performance. The results of the rest of the corporate governance indicators are mixed when using different performance measurement variables.


Author(s):  
Мехти Галиб Мехтиев ◽  
Mekhti Galib Mekhtiev

The present article evaluates history of swap agreements’ application and their functioning system in the framework of intercentral bank relations (in particular by the Federal Reserve System of the United States (the Fed)). Swap includes two transactions: the first is a currency exchange on the spot market rate and the second is a future transaction on the rate defined in advance. This mechanism proved its efficiency within its application through history. In 1970s, during a radical transformation period of an entire global currency architecture caused by collapse of Bretton Woods’s system the Fed applied swap agreements to promote stability on financial markets and particularly on currency markets. Later during the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 these agreements again have become rescue measures for the global financial system, as the financial shock caused liquidity deficit for financial institutions and thus cut dramatically credit supply. And finally nowadays the global financial system is badly in need of swap agreements. The swaps’ force of attraction is that firstly it differs from crediting as the latter is one way currency extension, while swap agreement is the exchange of equivalent values. And secondly it fixes the rate of the future currency transaction what lightens both monetary regulation within national jurisdiction and regulation on the level of public international law.


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