Showing posts with label BIS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BIS. Show all posts

Sunday, September 18, 2016

"Helicopter money" - reality bites

Since the Great Financial Crisis, central banks in the major economies have adopted a whole range of new measures to influence monetary and financial conditions. The measures have gone far beyond the typical pre-crisis mode of operation - controlling a short-term policy rate and moving it within a positive range - and have therefore come to be known as "unconventional monetary policies." To be sure, some of these measures had already been pioneered by the Bank of Japan roughly a decade earlier in the wake of that country's banking crisis and uncomfortably low inflation. But no one had anticipated that they would spread to the rest of the world so quickly and become so daring, testing the boundaries of the unthinkable.
https://www.bis.org/speeches/sp160906.htm

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Oil Debt

The total debt of the oil and gas sector globally stands at roughly $2.5 trillion, two and a half times what it was at the end of 2006. The recent fall in the oil price represents a significant decline in the value of assets backing this debt, introducing a new element to price developments. In common with other episodes of retrenchment induced by rapid declines in asset values, greater leverage may have amplified the dynamics of the oil price decline. The high debt burden of the oil sector also complicates the assessment of the macroeconomic effects of the oil price decline because of its impact on capital expenditure and government budgets, and due to the interaction with a stronger dollar.1


https://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt1503f.htm

Global Asset Allocation Shifts

We show that global asset reallocations of U.S. fund investors obey a strong factor structure, with two factors accounting for more than 90% of the overall variation. The first factor captures switches between U.S. bonds and equities. The second reflects reallocations from U.S. to international assets. Portfolio allocations respond to U.S. monetary policy, most prominently around FOMC events when institutional investors reallocate from basically all other asset classes to U.S. equities. Reallocations of both retail and institutional investors show return-chasing behavior. Institutional investors tend to reallocate toward riskier, high-yield fixed income segments, consistent with a search for yield.
https://www.bis.org/publ/work497.pdf