We critically review the state of the art in macro stress testing, assessing its strengths and weaknesses. We argue that, given current technology, macro stress tests are ill-suited as early warning devices, ie as tools for identifying vulnerabilities during seemingly tranquil times and for...

We characterise empirically the financial cycle using two approaches: analysis of turning points and frequency-based filters. We identify the financial cycle with the medium-term component in the joint fluctuations of credit and property prices; equity prices do not fit this picture well. We...

This paper provides some general lessons for the design of countercyclical capital buffers. Its main empirical contribution is to analyse conditioning variables which could guide the build-up and release of capital. A major distinction for countercyclical capital schemes is whether conditioning...

We investigate the performance of different variables as anchors for setting the level of the countercyclical regulatory capital buffer requirements for banks. The gap between the ratio of credit-to-GDP and its long-term backward-looking trend performs best as an indicator for the accumulation...

Early warning indicators (EWIs) of banking crises should ideally be evaluated on the basis of their performance relative to the macroprudential policy maker's decision problem. We translate several practical aspects of this problem - such as difficulties in assessing the costs and benefits of...

We develop a measure of systemic importance that accounts for the extent to which a bank propagates shocks across the banking system and is vulnerable to propagated shocks. Based on Shapley values, this measure gauges the contribution of interconnected banks to systemic risk, in contrast to...

Funding liquidity risk has played a key role in all historical banking crises. Nevertheless, a measure based on publicly available data remains so far elusive. We address this gap by showing that aggressive bidding at central bank auctions reveals funding liquidity risk. We can extract an...

In analysing the performance of the international monetary and financial system (IMFS), too much attention has been paid to the current account and far too little to the capital account. This is true of both formal analytical models and historical narratives. This approach may be reasonable when...

This essay argues that the Achilles heel of the international monetary and financial system is that it amplifies the “excess financial elasticity” of domestic policy regimes, ie it exacerbates their inability to prevent the build-up of financial imbalances, or outsize financial cycles, that...

If the criteria for an institution's success are diffusion and longevity, then central banking has been hugely successful. But if the criterion is the degree to which it has achieved its goals, then the evaluation has to be more nuanced. Historically, those goals have included a changing mix of...