The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report


Book Description

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, published by the U.S. Government and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in early 2011, is the official government report on the United States financial collapse and the review of major financial institutions that bankrupted and failed, or would have without help from the government. The commission and the report were implemented after Congress passed an act in 2009 to review and prevent fraudulent activity. The report details, among other things, the periods before, during, and after the crisis, what led up to it, and analyses of subprime mortgage lending, credit expansion and banking policies, the collapse of companies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the federal bailouts of Lehman and AIG. It also discusses the aftermath of the fallout and our current state. This report should be of interest to anyone concerned about the financial situation in the U.S. and around the world.THE FINANCIAL CRISIS INQUIRY COMMISSION is an independent, bi-partisan, government-appointed panel of 10 people that was created to "examine the causes, domestic and global, of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States." It was established as part of the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009. The commission consisted of private citizens with expertise in economics and finance, banking, housing, market regulation, and consumer protection. They examined and reported on "the collapse of major financial institutions that failed or would have failed if not for exceptional assistance from the government."News Dissector DANNY SCHECHTER is a journalist, blogger and filmmaker. He has been reporting on economic crises since the 1980's when he was with ABC News. His film In Debt We Trust warned of the economic meltdown in 2006. He has since written three books on the subject including Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity (Cosimo Books, 2008), and The Crime Of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big to Jail (Disinfo Books, 2011), a companion to his latest film Plunder The Crime Of Our Time. He can be reached online at www.newsdissector.com.




Fragilities in the U.S. Treasury Market


Book Description

Changes in the structure of the U.S. Treasury market over recent years may have increased risks to financial stability. Traditional market makers have changed their liquidity provision by increasingly switching from risk warehousing to risk distribution, and a new breed of market maker has emerged with the rise of electronic trading. The “flash rally” of October 15, 2014 provides a clear example of how those risks can materialize. Based on an in-depth analysis of the event—complementing the authorities’ work—we suggest i) providing incentives for liquidity provision, ii) improving market safeguards, and iii) enhancing the regulation of the Treasury market.




The Microstructure of Financial Markets


Book Description

The analysis of the microstructure of financial markets has been one of the most important areas of research in finance and has allowed scholars and practitioners alike to have a much more sophisticated understanding of the dynamics of price formation in financial markets. Frank de Jong and Barbara Rindi provide an integrated graduate level textbook treatment of the theory and empirics of the subject, starting with a detailed description of the trading systems on stock exchanges and other markets and then turning to economic theory and asset pricing models. Special attention is paid to models explaining transaction costs, with a treatment of the measurement of these costs and the implications for the return on investment. The final chapters review recent developments in the academic literature. End-of-chapter exercises and downloadable data from the book's companion website provide opportunities to revise and apply models developed in the text.




Credit Default Swaps


Book Description

Credit Default Swaps: A Survey is the most comprehensive review of all major research domains involving credit default swaps (CDS). CDS have been growing in importance in the global financial markets. However, their role has been hotly debated, in industry and academia, particularly since the credit crisis of 2007-2009. The authors review the extant literature on CDS that has accumulated over the past two decades and divide the survey into seven topics after providing a broad overview in the introduction. The second section traces the historical development of CDS markets and provides an introduction to CDS contract definitions and conventions. The third section discusses the pricing of CDS, from the perspective of no-arbitrage principles, structural, and reduced-form credit risk models. It also summarizes the literature on the determinants of CDS spreads, with a focus on the role of fundamental credit risk factors, liquidity and counterparty risk. The fourth section discusses how the development of the CDS market has affected the characteristics of the bond and equity markets, with an emphasis on market efficiency, price discovery, information flow, and liquidity. Attention is also paid to the CDS-bond basis, the wedge between the pricing of the CDS and its reference bond, and the mispricing between the CDS and the equity market. The fifth section examines the effect of CDS trading on firms' credit and bankruptcy risk, and how it affects corporate financial policy, including bond issuance, capital structure, liquidity management, and corporate governance. The sixth section analyzes how CDS impact the economic incentives of financial intermediaries. The seventh section reviews the growing literature on sovereign CDS and highlights the major differences between the sovereign and corporate CDS markets. The eighth section discusses CDS indices, especially the role of synthetic CDS index products backed by residential mortgage-backed securities during the financial crisis. The authors close with our suggestions for promising future research directions on CDS contracts and markets.




Asset Prices and Monetary Policy


Book Description

Economic growth, low inflation, and financial stability are among the most important goals of policy makers, and central banks such as the Federal Reserve are key institutions for achieving these goals. In Asset Prices and Monetary Policy, leading scholars and practitioners probe the interaction of central banks, asset markets, and the general economy to forge a new understanding of the challenges facing policy makers as they manage an increasingly complex economic system. The contributors examine how central bankers determine their policy prescriptions with reference to the fluctuating housing market, the balance of debt and credit, changing beliefs of investors, the level of commodity prices, and other factors. At a time when the public has never been more involved in stocks, retirement funds, and real estate investment, this insightful book will be useful to all those concerned with the current state of the economy.




Handbook of Fixed-Income Securities


Book Description

A comprehensive guide to the current theories and methodologies intrinsic to fixed-income securities Written by well-known experts from a cross section of academia and finance, Handbook of Fixed-Income Securities features a compilation of the most up-to-date fixed-income securities techniques and methods. The book presents crucial topics of fixed income in an accessible and logical format. Emphasizing empirical research and real-life applications, the book explores a wide range of topics from the risk and return of fixed-income investments, to the impact of monetary policy on interest rates, to the post-crisis new regulatory landscape. Well organized to cover critical topics in fixed income, Handbook of Fixed-Income Securities is divided into eight main sections that feature: • An introduction to fixed-income markets such as Treasury bonds, inflation-protected securities, money markets, mortgage-backed securities, and the basic analytics that characterize them • Monetary policy and fixed-income markets, which highlight the recent empirical evidence on the central banks’ influence on interest rates, including the recent quantitative easing experiments • Interest rate risk measurement and management with a special focus on the most recent techniques and methodologies for asset-liability management under regulatory constraints • The predictability of bond returns with a critical discussion of the empirical evidence on time-varying bond risk premia, both in the United States and abroad, and their sources, such as liquidity and volatility • Advanced topics, with a focus on the most recent research on term structure models and econometrics, the dynamics of bond illiquidity, and the puzzling dynamics of stocks and bonds • Derivatives markets, including a detailed discussion of the new regulatory landscape after the financial crisis and an introduction to no-arbitrage derivatives pricing • Further topics on derivatives pricing that cover modern valuation techniques, such as Monte Carlo simulations, volatility surfaces, and no-arbitrage pricing with regulatory constraints • Corporate and sovereign bonds with a detailed discussion of the tools required to analyze default risk, the relevant empirical evidence, and a special focus on the recent sovereign crises A complete reference for practitioners in the fields of finance, business, applied statistics, econometrics, and engineering, Handbook of Fixed-Income Securities is also a useful supplementary textbook for graduate and MBA-level courses on fixed-income securities, risk management, volatility, bonds, derivatives, and financial markets. Pietro Veronesi, PhD, is Roman Family Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he teaches Masters and PhD-level courses in fixed income, risk management, and asset pricing. Published in leading academic journals and honored by numerous awards, his research focuses on stock and bond valuation, return predictability, bubbles and crashes, and the relation between asset prices and government policies.




Commodity Price Dynamics


Book Description

Commodities have become an important component of many investors' portfolios and the focus of much political controversy over the past decade. This book utilizes structural models to provide a better understanding of how commodities' prices behave and what drives them. It exploits differences across commodities and examines a variety of predictions of the models to identify where they work and where they fail. The findings of the analysis are useful to scholars, traders and policy makers who want to better understand often puzzling - and extreme - movements in the prices of commodities from aluminium to oil to soybeans to zinc.




News Shocks in Open Economies


Book Description

This paper explores the effect of news shocks on the current account and other macroeconomic variables using worldwide giant oil discoveries as a directly observable measure of news shocks about future output ? the delay between a discovery and production is on average 4 to 6 years. We first present a two-sector small open economy model in order to predict the responses of macroeconomic aggregates to news of an oil discovery. We then estimate the effects of giant oil discoveries on a large panel of countries. Our empirical estimates are consistent with the predictions of the model. After an oil discovery, the current account and saving rate decline for the first 5 years and then rise sharply during the ensuing years. Investment rises robustly soon after the news arrives, while GDP does not increase until after 5 years. Employment rates fall slightly for a sustained period of time.




Exchange-Rate Dynamics


Book Description

A comprehensive and in-depth look at exchange-rate dynamics Variations in the foreign exchange market influence all aspects of the world economy, and understanding these dynamics is one of the great challenges of international economics. This book provides a new, comprehensive, and in-depth examination of the standard theories and latest research in exchange-rate economics. Covering a vast swath of theoretical and empirical work, the book explores established theories of exchange-rate determination using macroeconomic fundamentals, and presents unique microbased approaches that combine the insights of microstructure models with the macroeconomic forces driving currency trading. Macroeconomic models have long assumed that agents—households, firms, financial institutions, and central banks—all have the same information about the structure of the economy and therefore hold the same expectations and uncertainties regarding foreign currency returns. Microbased models, however, look at how heterogeneous information influences the trading decisions of agents and becomes embedded in exchange rates. Replicating key features of actual currency markets, these microbased models generate a rich array of empirical predictions concerning trading patterns and exchange-rate dynamics that are strongly supported by data. The models also show how changing macroeconomic conditions exert an influence on short-term exchange-rate dynamics via their impact on currency trading. Designed for graduate courses in international macroeconomics, international finance, and finance, and as a go-to reference for researchers in international economics, Exchange-Rate Dynamics guides readers through a range of literature on exchange-rate determination, offering fresh insights for further reading and research. Comprehensive and in-depth examination of the latest research in exchange-rate economics Outlines theoretical and empirical research across the spectrum of modeling approaches Presents new results on the importance of currency trading in exchange-rate determination Provides new perspectives on long-standing puzzles in exchange-rate economics End-of-chapter questions cement key ideas