Volumen 11 (2022): Heft 2 (May 2022)

The United States is recognized as the largest economic entity in the world and its financial system has developed steadily through the guidance of the Federal Reserve System for over one hundred years. However, in recent years, the global economic downturn, coupled with the global COVID-19 pandemic, has led to an unprecedented economic depression and rapid decline in the United States financial sector. Although the U.S. government has gradually instructed banks to raise the core quantity but a giant crisis under the economic depression is still present. This study thus takes U.S. commercial banks as the subject of research and employs the two-stage bootstrapped truncated regression to investigate the impacts of increases in required Core, Tier 1, and total capital adequacy ratios on their efficiency.

Financial technology innovations (Fintech) are changing the provision of traditional financial services. Although they bring with them various benefits and opportunities, they also have weaknesses and pose potential threats to financial systems. The paper examines the latest developments in the area of Fintech and outlines the potential benefits and associated risks. It highlights the vital role of the monetary authorities in the context of the policies and initiatives required in order to modernize the financial system, including research and the potential issuance of central bank digital currency, while simultaneously fulfilling their core objectives of preserving monetary and financial stability. The authors highlight the importance of artificial intelligence in Fintech development. They create a Fintech SWOT to support and analyse the above. It goes on further to explain the new management concept of “Risk-based thinking” as a way to approach these potential opportunities and threats of Fintech. Finally, the paper looks at cyber risk in the Fintech landscape as the latest and potentially greatest threat springing from these turbulent and uncertain times.

This study measures liquidity creation within a sample of 153 banks operating in 12 Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries from 2008 to 2017. We found that these banks created a total of $461.32 billion in liquidity in 2017, approximately 1.51 times the total liquidity created in 2008, mainly driven by commercial banks in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. We also conducted an econometric analysis to investigate the internal and external factors affecting bank liquidity creation, applying a Fixed Effects model and the new Method of Moments Quantile Regression (MMQR). The results show that, among bank-specific factors, bank liquidity creation in MENA countries is related to capital, size, bank risk, deposits and profitability whilst market concentration does not appear to play a significant role. Regarding macroeconomic factors, inflation, unemployment, savings and monetary policy explain the variations in bank liquidity creation.

The subject of this paper is the evaluation of monetary policy reaction function on panel data of 37 world economies, both advanced and emerging markets, during the period of 1995Q1 – 2018Q3. The paper aims to evaluate the role and importance of the exchange rate in monetary policy reaction function depending on the level of economic development. For this purpose, a relevant set of unbalanced panel data was formed with a balanced relationship between developed and emerging market economies. The methodology of empirical research is based on the econometric assessment of monetary policy reaction function within which the central bank adjusts its key policy rate to the dynamics of inflation, output gap and fluctuations of the real effective exchange rate. The research results confirm the hypothesis that the exchange rate represents a statistically significant variable only in the monetary policy reaction function of emerging market economies. In contrast, adequate specification of developed economies’ monetary policy rule includes only standard macroeconomic fundamentals – inflation and output gap.

Banking is important for the stability and success of the economy. The success of the banking system on financial intermediation in developing countries is directly affected by non-performing loans (NPLs). Many factors can be treated as NPL determinants. Accordingly, the factors that explain NPLs contain very important information for banks. To this end, the study is an attempt to examine various banking factors that affect NPLs with respect to developing economies. In this study, the bank-specific and macroeconomic factors affecting the NPL rates were analysed through the dynamic panel data analysis. Analyses were made using described G20 countries between 1998 and 2017. The results indicate that the lagged value of NPLs, return on equity, credit growth and credit costs have a significant positive relationship with NPLs, while capital adequacy and GDP have a negative association with NPLs. The results confirm that if the bank-specific conditions change, the credit quality and bank management of banks are affected. It was concluded that the performance of banks is responsive to an effective loan monitoring policy. The findings of the study have implications for policymakers and regulators in the banking sector.

Current research on cloud computing often focuses on the technology itself and the benefits that one company can use and choose from cloud services. Most of the research has focused on mainstream enterprises and limited regard to Central Banks’ (CBs’) Cloud Computing Adoption (CCA). CBs are continually exploring opportunities to enhance IT efficacy while minimizing expenditures and ensuring data protection and network security. This paper investigates the factors affecting the CBs’ CCA by surveying 40 CBs representing approximately 25% of total CBs worldwide. The main participants were senior IT managers who are responsible for any IT decisions in CBs. The findings are also significant for other organizations or businesses where data privacy is crucial. The study results indicate that CBs are still reluctant to migrate to the public cloud. Influential factors preventing CCA are data protection, privacy, and risks.

The U.S. Subprime Crisis and the subsequent Great Recession have highlighted a renewed interest in the proper design and implementation of Early Warning Systems (E.W.S.), in order to help deter the onset of subsequent extreme financial events, through the implementation of adequate crisis detection mechanisms. The present article describes the Adaptive Early Warning Systems (A.E.W.S.) axiomatic approach, as a natural operational extension to E.W.S. testing. This novel protocol upholds the operational dimension of implementing an efficient holistic crisis detection mechanism, a domain which has been hitherto overlooked by the E.W.S. literature. The paper first describes the major axiomatic principles sustaining the A.E.W.S. protocol, which seek to establish universal principles in support of the said protocol. Second, the article also describes a basic universal template for an A.E.W.S. surveillance platform, which duly describes how multiple testing procedures can be integrated into a single crisis detection framework, while targeting multiple segments of the financial markets (such as the conventional and non-conventional segments of the financial markets). Third, the paper also describes the major advantages and disadvantages associated with the implementation of this novel protocol. It is hoped that the effective implementation of the A.E.W.S. protocol as a novel operational framework in the global macroprudential toolkit might help deter the onset of future extreme financial events, by enabling a greater cohesiveness in E.W.S.-related central banking procedures, as well as promoting a greater international central banking cooperation prior to and during financial distress episodes.

In this paper, we use index number theory to decompose changes in total interest rate due to changes in the interest rate component and the weight component. We discuss the optimal calculation of a binary index using axiomatic index number theory. Based on this theory we compare alternative indexes and as a result, we choose the Marshall-Edgeworth index because most axioms are satisfied by this index. Comparing the results of binary periods decomposition, we conclude that the differences are not significant when we apply different indices. For multiple period comparison, we suggest using the chain index because it allows accounting for the weights evolution during the whole period. In addition, we derive a formula that could be useful for explaining the differences between chain and direct indexes when we produce multiple period comparison.

The purpose of the research is to offer a comparative analysis of a libertarian and gradual approach to introducing a market interest rate. The topic is time-relevant since the economies of the emerging markets today face difficult challenges posed by economic, financial and health-care crises, impending price stability, future growth and money market equilibrium. A digital currency is a special issue today due to the outbreak of covid-19, which has made many central banks think about contactless means of payment. The author revealed policy tools to circulate a hypothetical digital currency for the BRICS, including a shared interest rate and the quantity of digital money in circulation needed for the penta-lateral use. The theoretical significance is that the research tries to lay the foundation for a model to launch a virtual regional money market for the countries of the BRICS as well as their partners in wider parts of Europe and Asia. In practical terms, the article recommends a number of tools for monetary policy to deal with the coronavirus crisis of 2020.

The article examines the impact of changes in the gold part of the reserves of the National Bank of Kazakhstan on their total volume with an emphasis on the factor of changes in the price of gold. The value of the factor of the price of gold increases during periods of global financial crises when Kazakhstan, as an oil exporting country, is under strong pressure on the current account and the exchange rate of the tenge due to a decline in oil prices. During these periods, the National Bank conducts foreign exchange interventions to support the tenge exchange rate and spends its reserves, which increases the relevance of their safety. The paper tests the hypothesis that in such periods, the rise in the price of gold, due to its function as a safe haven asset, can compensate expenditures on foreign exchange interventions for the central banks and increase the stability of reserves. From this point of view, the article examines three periods of high turbulence in world markets of the 2000s and changes in the National Bank’s gross reserves, as well as the influence of the gold factor on these changes. It was revealed that during the crisis periods, the rise in the price of gold contributed to the stability of the gross reserves of the National Bank, and the effectiveness of this factor was directly proportional to the gold share in the reserves.