Rui Esteves, Seán Kenny, Jason Lennard 20 July 2021
There is little consensus on the macroeconomic impacts of sovereign debt crises, despite the regularity of such events. This column quantifies the aggregate costs of defaults using a narrative approach on a large panel of 50 sovereigns between 1870 and 2010. It estimates significant and persistent negative effects of debt crises starting at 1.6% of GDP and peaking at 3.3%, before reverting to trend five years later. In addition, underlying causes matter. Defaults driven by aggregate demand shocks result in short-term contractions, whereas aggregate supply shocks lead to larger, more persistent losses.
Nicola Gennaioli, Alberto Martin, Stefano Rossi
Matthieu Crozet, Julian Hinz, Amrei Stammann, Joschka Wanner
Politics affects the banking sector in many ways (e.g. Calomiris and Huber 2014). For example, governments in many countries direct commercial bank lending to specific sectors and/or stimulate lending to small and medium-sized enterprises (e.g. Brown and Dinc 2005). And during the recent COVID-19 pandemic, many governments created emergency loan guarantee schemes that were covering and spurring their banks lending. In this column, we turn to another recent and striking episode of political impact, namely, the global financial sanctions on Russian banks with close ties to their domestic government that commenced in 2014 and were sequentially imposed on various banks during a five-year period. In general, economic sanctions become increasingly popular from 2010s, being mostly driven by the US to restrain politically unfavourable regimes (Felbermayr et al. 2021). While their effects at the firm level are well studied (Croz
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A banking crisis is often seen as a self-fulfulling prophecy: The expectation of bank failure makes it happen. Picture people lining up to withdraw their money during the Great Depression or customers making a run on Britain’s Northern Rock bank in 2007.
But a new paper co-authored by an MIT professor suggests we have been missing the bigger picture about banking crises. Yes, there are sometimes panics about banks that create self-reinforcing problems. But many banking crises are quieter: Even without customers panicking, banks can suffer losses serious enough to create subsequent economy-wide downturns.
“Panics are not needed for banking crises to have severe economic consequences,” says Emil Verner, the MIT professor who helped lead the study. “But when panics do occur, those tend to be the most severe episodes. Panics are an important amplification mechanism for banking crises, but not a necessary condition.”
Natalia Martín Fuentes, Isabella Moder 05 February 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented shock to the global economy and its potential scarring effects are thus difficult to predict. This column presents estimates of the long-term impact of past crises, suggesting that past epidemics and other exogenous shocks did not cause scarring effects, while the negative impact of financial crises on the long-term level of potential growth tends to be persistent. However, unlike previous exogenous shocks, the COVID-19 pandemic could affect the supply side of the economy through several channels and thus lead to a permanently lower level of potential output.