Mark J. Manning

Intraday Liquidity: Risk and Regulation

Banks require access to liquidity intraday in order to settle obligations in payment and settlement systems. The recent financial crisis has highlighted the need for banks to improve their liquidity risk management, including the management of intraday liquidity risk. The FSA’s new liquidity regime includes intraday liquidity as a key risk driver and requires that banks calibrate their liquid asset buffers considering their need for liquidity intraday, both in normal and stressed circumstances. The Bank fully supports this approach. However, this will increase the cost of intraday liquidity and so could create incentives for banks to change their behaviour as they seek to minimise costs. If this results in payment delays, it risks jeopardising the smooth functioning of payment and settlement systems. There are a number of tools that authorities could use to minimise the chance of adverse behavioural changes. Such tools include the introduction of liquidity saving mechanisms, the strengthening of throughput rules, payment tariffs that vary through the day, setting central bank collateral eligibility criteria for intraday liquidity and regulatory ‘deep dive’ assessments.

Comparing the pre-settlement risk implications of alternative clearing arrangements

In recent years, there has been a marked expansion in the range of products cleared through central counterparty clearing houses, accompanied by a trend towards consolidation in the clearing infrastructure. The financial stability implications of these developments are of considerable policy interest. In this paper, we use a simulation approach to analyse, in a systematic way, the potential pre-settlement cost and risk implications of these developments. Our results point towards substantial risk-reduction benefits from multilateral clearing arrangements, arising from multilateral netting and mutualisation. The paper also examines individual incentives to join multilateral clearing arrangements. We suggest that arrangements with restricted direct participation and tiered membership may be a natural response to the uneven distribution of total pre-settlement costs when agents are of heterogeneous credit quality and it is costly to individually tailor margin.

Exploring the Relationship Between Credit Spreads and Default Probabilities

Contrary to theory, recent empirical work suggests that changing default expectations can explain only a fraction of the variability in credit spreads. This paper takes a fresh look at this question, relating credit spreads for a sample of investment-grade bonds issued by UK industrial companies to default probabilities generated by the Bank of Englands Merton model of corporate failure. For the highest quality corporate issues, where the probability of default is low, this factor explains relatively little of the variation in credit spreads. For such bonds, common market factors - perhaps related to liquidity conditions - appear to be of greater importance. This is consistent with previous empirical work. For lower-rated investment-grade bonds, however, the probability of default is found to be a more important determinant of credit spreads, explaining around a third of variability in a pooled regression. When coefficients are allowed to vary at the level of the individual issue, explanatory power rises to 50% for this group. This is much higher than previous studies have found, reflecting both the more direct application of the Merton model and the recognition that idiosyncrasies in factors such as liquidity conditions and expected recovery rates are likely to undermine results from pooled estimation.

Modelling the Cross-Border Use of Collateral in Payment Systems

Banks often rely on collateralised intraday liquidity from the central bank in order to be able to effect payments in a real-time gross settlement (RTGS) payment system. If a bank is holding insufficient eligible collateral in a particular country, and therefore cannot obtain credit from the local central bank, it may have to delay payments. This constitutes a liquidity risk to the system. Furthermore, a bank operating in multiple systems may face a mismatch between the location of its collateral holdings and liquidity needs. In this paper, we examine the extent to which the liquidity risk arising from such a mismatch may be mitigated by allowing cross-border use of collateral. We develop a two-country, two-bank model in which risk-neutral banks minimise expected costs with respect to their collateral choice in each country. In our baseline model, in which each bank faces a liquidity need in only one country, we find that liquidity risk is indeed reduced by cross-border use of collateral. This result holds despite the fact that banks may find it optimal to economise on their total holdings of collateral. However, when we extend the model to allow for the possibility that a bank faces liquidity needs in both countries simultaneously, the total quantum of collateral held is important. Indeed, when a bank finds it optimal to reduce its total holdings, there may be an increase in liquidity risk in at least one country when simultaneous liquidity demands are realised.