Harold James: Distressing Stress Tests
[Harold James is Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University and Marie Curie Professor of History at the European University Institute, Florence. His most recent book is The Creation and Destruction of Value: The Globalization Cycle.]
The stress tests applied to American banks last year are widely credited with restoring financial stability in the United States and removing the fear that major financial institutions might fail. Europeans hope that the recent publication of the results of stress tests that were applied to their own banks will have the same effect. But, while the results of the tests may be good for the financial sector, they may be bad for the real economy. The financial crisis is over, but the age of general economic slowdown is only just beginning.
Financial crises have two sorts of effects on the real economy. In the acute stage of the crisis, there is so much nervousness and anxiety that it is almost impossible for anyone to borrow. The inter-bank market dries up, as banks lose trust in one another. Only central banks – typically lenders of last resort – lean against the hurricane-strength winds.
It was the complete collapse of trade credit that sent global commerce into a tailspin for half a year after the failure of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. At moments like these, financial crises look like a heart attack – wreaking immediate and devastating damage to the whole of the economic body....
Regulators and governments view the main purpose of financial stress tests as being to persuade some institutions of the urgent need to improve their capital ratios. But major new injections of capital into the banking system are unlikely, owing to lingering fear from the recent financial past.
Instead, the easiest way to improve capital ratios is to cut lending. That was what happened in the major industrial countries in the 1930’s, where an acute crisis in 1931-1933, with some government recapitalization, was followed by a decade of contracting bank lending to private firms....
Read entire article at Project Syndicate
The stress tests applied to American banks last year are widely credited with restoring financial stability in the United States and removing the fear that major financial institutions might fail. Europeans hope that the recent publication of the results of stress tests that were applied to their own banks will have the same effect. But, while the results of the tests may be good for the financial sector, they may be bad for the real economy. The financial crisis is over, but the age of general economic slowdown is only just beginning.
Financial crises have two sorts of effects on the real economy. In the acute stage of the crisis, there is so much nervousness and anxiety that it is almost impossible for anyone to borrow. The inter-bank market dries up, as banks lose trust in one another. Only central banks – typically lenders of last resort – lean against the hurricane-strength winds.
It was the complete collapse of trade credit that sent global commerce into a tailspin for half a year after the failure of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. At moments like these, financial crises look like a heart attack – wreaking immediate and devastating damage to the whole of the economic body....
Regulators and governments view the main purpose of financial stress tests as being to persuade some institutions of the urgent need to improve their capital ratios. But major new injections of capital into the banking system are unlikely, owing to lingering fear from the recent financial past.
Instead, the easiest way to improve capital ratios is to cut lending. That was what happened in the major industrial countries in the 1930’s, where an acute crisis in 1931-1933, with some government recapitalization, was followed by a decade of contracting bank lending to private firms....