Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Dealing with macroeconomic pressures


In an economic downturn, dealing with macroeconomic pressures is bad enough. But financial institutions add to their woes, experts say, by refusing to provide capital to worthy businesses because they fear other lenders will also cut back. In the end banks create a credit shortage that extends the crisis and delays recovery.
This sort of self-fulfilling credit crunch is the focus of Wharton research that explores alternative ways to prevent inefficient credit tightening from causing further damage to an already wounded economy. In a paper titled, "Self-Fulfilling Credit Market Freezes," Wharton finance professor Itay Goldstein and Lucian A. Bebchuk of Harvard Law School examine different approaches to halt an overreaching credit crunch.
After examining numerous policy responses to the problem, the authors suggest that governments should put up capital to be distributed to nonfinancial companies. However, they say the public sector should rely on private entities that are putting some of their own capital at risk to evaluate proposals and disperse the funds. That way, the money will not get caught in a bank-created credit squeeze and instead will be directed toward viable businesses. This solution to self-driven financial crises is similar to the U.S. government's Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, which helped free up credit during the height of the 2008–09 financial crisis, the authors conclude.
Finding the Right Solution When times are good, banks do not need government help. Likewise, when companies or industries are deeply affected by poor macroeconomic fundamentals, there may be little impact from government involvement in credit markets. However, the authors suggest there is an "intermediate range" of economic distress that requires a more sophisticated approach to keep credit flowing as businesses pass through a rough patch. Using a theoretical model that tests a series of potential policy actions, the paper reveals the strengths and weaknesses of each response, as well as the conditions in which one policy might work better than another.Uniunea europeana,creditare,coalitia,dosare,interne,guvern,prezidentiale,dreapta, finante,IMF,liberalism,marea neagra,lege,europarlamentare,The New York Times,USA Todayparlament

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