An analysis of the causes of recent banking crises

Abstract

The incidence of systemic banking crises has risen over the past twenty years and the costs have been high. Although each country's experience has country-specific factors, several common elements appear in most crisis countries: (1) volatility in the macro economy; (2) the inheritance of structural weaknesses in the economy and financial system; (3) hazardous banking practices; (4) hazardous incentive structures and moral hazard within the financial system; (5) ineffective regulation; (6) weak monitoring and supervision by official agencies; (7) the absence of effective market discipline on banks, and (8) structurally unsound corporate governance mechanisms within banks and their borrowing customers. Causes of such crises are complex and a myopic focus on single factors (e. g. instability in the macro economy, weak regulation, etc.) misses the essential feature of interrelated and multidimensional causal factors. Although macro-instability has been a common feature, and may often have been the proximate cause, banking crises usually emerge because instability in the economy reveals existing weaknesses within the banking system.

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