金融炼金术的终结

• 不过如北

  2017-05-09
  Risk-weighted capital requirements appealed to many of my international colleagues because risk was explicitly incorporated into the calculation. But if the nature of the uncertainty is unknown, then the use of such measures can be highly misleading. It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong, and to use a simple but more robust measure of required capital. Heuristics are better than so-called optimising solutions that assume the wrong model. In the case of bank regulation, it is better to use a measure of leverage rather than a ratio of capital to risk-weighted assets. Leverage ratios measure capital relative to total (unweighted) assets. A Bank of England study of 116 large global banks during the crisis (of which 74 survived and 42 failed) found that the simple but robust lev...
• 不过如北

  2017-04-14
  When the world economy is functioning well, capital normally flows from mature to developing economies where profitable opportunities abound, as happened in the late nineteenth century when Europe invested in Latin America. A strange feature of the savings glut was that because emerging economies were saving more than they were investing at home, they were actually exporting capital to advanced economies where investment opportunities were more limited. In effect, advanced economies were borrowing large sums from the less developed world. The natural direction of capital flows was reversed - capital was being pushed "uphill".