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Dealer banks--that is, large banks that deal in securities and derivatives, such as J. P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs--are of a size and complexity that sharply distinguish them from typical commercial banks. When they fail, as we saw in the global financial crisis, they pose significant risks to our financial system and the world economy.How Big Banks Fail and What to Do about Itexamines how these banks collapse and how we can prevent the need to bail them out. In sharp, clinical detail, Darrell Duffie walks readers step-by-step through the mechanics of large-bank failures. He identifies where the cracks first appear when a dealer bank is weakened by severe trading losses, and demonstrates how the bank's relationships with its customers and business partners abruptly change when its solvency is threatened. As others seek to reduce their exposure to the dealer bank, the bank is forced to signal its strength by using up its slim stock of remaining liquid capital. Duffie shows how the key mechanisms in a dealer bank's collapse--such as Lehman Brothers' failure in 2008--derive from special institutional frameworks and regulations that influence the flight of short-term secured creditors, hedge-fund clients, derivatives counterparties, and most devastatingly, the loss of clearing and settlement services. How Big Banks Fail and What to Do about Itreveals why today's regulatory and institutional frameworks for mitigating large-bank failures don't address the special risks to our financial system that are posed by dealer banks, and outlines the improvements in regulations and market institutions that are needed to address these systemic risks.

How do dealers price contemporary art in a world where objective criteria seem absent?Talking Pricesis the first book to examine this question from a sociological perspective. On the basis of a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data, including interviews with art dealers in New York and Amsterdam, Olav Velthuis shows how contemporary art galleries juggle the contradictory logics of art and economics. In doing so, they rely on a highly ritualized business repertoire. For instance, a sharp distinction between a gallery's museumlike front space and its businesslike back space safeguards the separation of art from commerce. Velthuis shows that prices, far from being abstract numbers, convey rich meanings to trading partners that extend well beyond the works of art. A high price may indicate not only the quality of a work but also the identity of collectors who bought it before the artist's reputation was established. Such meanings are far from unequivocal. For some, a high price may be a symbol of status; for others, it is a symbol of fraud. Whereas sociological thought has long viewed prices as reducing qualities to quantities, this pathbreaking and engagingly written book reveals the rich world behind these numerical values. Art dealers distinguish different types of prices and attach moral significance to them. Thus the price mechanism constitutes a symbolic system akin to language.

We examine the link between sovereign defaults and credit risk by distinguishing between commercial and official debt and by taking into account the extent of the final restructuring events, which take place at the end of a default spell. We use a local projection-based approach, combined with propensity score weighting (Jordà and Taylor 2016), to estimate the average treatment effect of the final restructuring on our outcome variables of agency ratings and bond yield spreads. Our results show that the average treatment effect on ratings is negative (and positive for bond spreads) up to seven years following the final restructuring with private creditors, while the opposite holds for official creditors. Furthermore, our results are robust to using a panel analysis, which allows us to investigate the importance of the final haircut size. Specifically, we find that the rating (spread) variation (increase) is larger for cases with deeper haircuts. Therefore, we find evidence that official and private defaults have different costs and then may induce selective defaults.

This paper presents a three-period model featuring a short-term investor in the over-the-counter bond market. A short-term investor stores cash because of a need to pay cash at some future date. If a short-term investor buys bonds, then a deadline for retrieving cash lowers the resale price of bonds for the investor through bilateral bargaining in the bond market. Ex-ante, this holdup problem explains the use of a repo by a short-term investor, the existence of a haircut, and the vulnerability of a repo market to counterparty risk. This result holds without any uncertainty about bond returns or asymmetric information.

In the presence of lenders’ wrong perception of collateral quality, haircuts help to reduce the excessive financing costs due to the gap between lenders’ perceived and actual risk. We study the credit cycles driven by the dynamic interaction between the terms of the collateralized loan contracts and lenders’ beliefs. Risky loans are more sensitive to collateral quality information than safe loans because defaults reveal the information about collateral quality. Endogenously determined information revelation can explain the increases in haircuts during the recent financial crisis and the positive relationship between the long quiet period and the impact of the crisis. The asymmetry between boom and bust dynamics can explain the difference in the opacity of collateralized loan contracts, the asymmetric impacts of revealed good and bad news, and can help to predict financial crises. A macroprudential policy of setting a minimum haircut can reduce output fluctuation, and a policy combining a minimum haircut and a collateral insurance can both stabilize the economy and further improve social welfare.

This article studies human rights due diligence by private corporate creditors in the context of sovereign debt restructurings. First, the legal bases of this specific due diligence are presented and systematized. Then, by providing empirical statistical evidence, the article analyses whether haircuts applied by creditors across countries regularly consider the social and economic human rights situation of the debtor countries in question, as part of creditors’ due diligence. Also, the main characteristics of bond markets that contribute to understanding the asymmetric power relationship between private lenders and sovereign borrowers are described. Finally, Argentina’s latest debt restructurings are studied in depth to determine whether human rights were taken into account when agreeing on the size of haircuts. From quantitative and qualitative data, this article concludes that the haircuts agreed by creditors are regularly not sensitive to the social and economic human rights situation of debtor populations or to the impact that debt agreements could have on them.

PurposeThe use of risk proxies in internal models remains a popular modelling solution. However, there is some risk that a proxy may not constitute an adequate representation of the underlying asset in terms of capturing tail risk. Therefore, using empirical examples for the financial collateral haircut model, this paper aims to critically review available statistical tools for measuring the adequacy of capturing tail risk by proxies used in the internal risk models of banks. In doing so, this paper advises on the most appropriate solutions for validating risk proxies.Design/methodology/approachThis paper reviews statistical tools used to validate if the equity index/fund benchmark are proxies that adequately represent tail risk in the returns on an individual asset (equity/fund). The following statistical tools for comparing return distributions of the proxies and the portfolio items are discussed: the two-sample Kolmogorov–Smirnov test, the spillover test and the Harrell’s C test.FindingsUpon the empirical review of the available statistical tools, this paper suggests using the two-sample Kolmogorov–Smirnov test to validate the adequacy of capturing tail risk by the assigned proxy and the Harrell’s C test to capture the discriminatory power of the proxy-based collateral haircuts models. This paper also suggests a tool that compares the reactions of risk proxies to tail events to verify possible underestimation of risk in times of significant stress.Originality/valueThe current regulations require banks to prove that the modelled proxies are representative of the real price observations without underestimation of tail risk and asset price volatility. This paper shows how to validate proxy-based financial collateral haircuts models.

Even with the sizable Foreign Exchange (FX) holdings and good credit ratings of its top assets, Asia remains vulnerable to various shocks. This paper highlights the limited crossborder asset pledgeability as a significant factor for the lingering vulnerability in Asia. The dichotomy in asset holdings between pledgeable FX and non-pledgeable domestic assets in major economies in Asia has been the source of increasing stabilization costs as well as weakened market momentum in the region. Specifically, the peculiar feature of asset holdings in Asia reflects seriously deficient cross-border asset pledgeability that is left unaddressed. Asset pledgeability contributes toward financial stability via three channels: 1) capital market development by recognizing the role of collateral, 2) increased shock absorption capacity via collateral management, 3) and the newly activated safe asset provision. Therefore, it is crucial to go beyond the usual market development strategy and expand the overall asset pledgeability in the region that has remained unduly depressed.

I use data on 180 sovereign defaults to analyze what determines the recovery rate after a debt restructuring process. Why do creditors recover, in some cases, more than 90 %, while in other cases they recover less than 10 %? I find support for the Grossman and Van Huyk model of “excusable defaults”: countries that experience more severe negative shocks tend to have higher “haircuts” than countries that face less severe shocks. I discuss in detail debt restructuring episodes in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Greece. The results suggest that the haircut imposed by Argentina in its 2005 restructuring (75 %) was “excessively high.” The other episodes’ haircuts are consistent with the model.

We consider the valuation of collateralized derivative contracts such as interest rate swaps or forward FX contracts. We allow for posting securities or cash in different currencies. In the latter case, we focus on using overnight index rates on the interbank market. Using time varying haircuts, we provide an intuitive way to derive the basic discounting results, keeping in line with the most standard theoretical and market views. In a number of cases associated with margining with major central counterparties, pricing rules for collateralized trades remain linear, thus the use of (multiple) discount curves. We also show how to deal with partial collateralization, involving haircuts, asymmetric CSA, counterparty risk and funding costs. We therefore intend to provide a unified view. Mathematical or legal details are not dealt with and we privilege financial insights and easy to grasp concepts and tools.