Liquidity, Contagion and Financial Crisis

Alexander Guembel () and Oren Sussman

No 664, IDEI Working Papers from Institut d'Économie Industrielle (IDEI), Toulouse

Abstract: We develop a theoretical model where a redistribution of bank capital (e.g., due to reckless trading and/or faulty risk management) leads to a “freeze” of the interbank market. The fire-sale market plays a central role in spreading the crisis to the real economy. In crisis, credit rationing and liquidity hoarding appear simultaneously; endogenous levels of collateral (or margin requirements) are affected by both low fire-sale prices and high lending rates. Relative to previous analysis, this dual channel generates a stronger price and output effect. The main focus is on the policy analysis. We show that i) non-discriminating equity injections are more effective than liquidity injections, but in both the welfare effect is an order-of-magnitude lower than the price effect; ii) a discriminating policy that bails out only distressed banks is feasible but will be limited by incentive-compatibility constraints; iii) a restriction on international capital flows has an ambiguous effect on welfare.

Keywords: Debt deflation; Bailout; Liquidity Injection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G21 G28 G33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-cba and nep-mon
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ide:wpaper:24167

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