Assignment:
How did the boom in the housing market in the early and mid-2000s exacerbate FIs transition away from their role as specialists in risk measurement and management?
1. Monitoring Costs. As mentioned above, a supplier of funds who directly invests in a fund user's financial claims faces a high cost of monitoring the fund user's actions in a timely and complete fashion. One solution to this problem is for a large number of small investors to group their funds together by holding the claims issued by a financial institution. In turn the FI invests in the direct financial claims issued by fund users. This aggregation of funds by fund suppliers in a financial institution resolves a number of problems.
2. Risks Incurred by Financial Institutions
As financial institutions perform the various services described above, they face many types of risk. Specifically, all FIs hold some assets that are potentially subject to default or credit risk (such as loans, stocks, and bonds). As FIs expand their services to non-U.S. customers or even domestic customers with business outside the United States, they are exposed to both foreign exchange risk and country or sovereign risk as well. Further, FIs tend to mismatch the maturities of their balance sheet assets and liabilities to a greater or lesser extent and are thus exposed to interest rate risk. If FIs actively trade these assets and liabilities rather than hold them for longer-term investments, they are further exposed to market risk or asset price risk. Increasingly, FIs hold contingent assets and liabilities off the balance sheet, which presents an additional risk called off-balance-sheet risk. Moreover, all FIs are exposed to some degree of liability withdrawal or liquidity risk, depending on the type of claims they have sold to liability holders. All FIs are exposed to technology risk and operational risk because the production of financial services requires the use of real resources and back-office support systems (labor and technology combined to provide services). Finally, the risk that an FI may not have enough capital reserves to offset a sudden loss incurred as a result of one or more of the risks it faces creates insolvency risk for the FI. 12 Chapters 19 through 24 provide an analysis of how FIs measure and manage these risks.
3. Regulation of Financial Institutions
The preceding section showed that financial institutions provide various services to sectors of the economy. Failure to provide these services, or a breakdown in their efficient provision, can be costly to both the ultimate suppliers of funds and users of funds as well as to the economy overall. The financial crisis of the late 2000s is a prime example of how such a breakdown in the provision of financial services can cripple financial markets worldwide and bring the world economy into a deep recession. For example, bank failures may destroy household savings and at the same time restrict a firm's access to credit. Insurance company failures may leave household members totally exposed in old age to the cost of catastrophic illnesses and to sudden drops in income upon retirement. In addition, individual FI failures may create doubts in savers'minds regarding the stability and solvency of FIs and the financial system in general and cause panics and even withdrawal runs on sound institutions. Indeed, this possibility provided the reasoning in 2008 for an increase in the deposit insurance cap to $250,000 per person per bank. At this time, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) was more concerned about the possibility of contagious runs as a few major FIs (e.g., IndyMac and Washington Mutual) failed or nearly failed. The FDIC wanted to instill confidence in the banking system and made the change to avoid massive depositor runs from many of the troubled (and even safer) FIs, more FI failures, and an even larger collapse of the financial system.
FIs are regulated in an attempt to prevent these types of market failures and the costs they would impose on the economy and society at large. Although regulation may be socially beneficial, it also imposes private costs, or a regulatory burden, on individual FI owners and managers. Consequently, regulation is an attempt to enhance the social welfare benefits and mitigate the costs of the provision of FI services. Describe the regulations (past and present) that have been imposed on U.S. financial institutions.