7 - Taming Liquidity and Leverage in the Shadow Banking Sector

Summary

Chapter 7 recounts the attempt of central banks to expand their regulatory remit and apply similar anti-cyclical measures to the shadow banking sector. Seeking to translate their newly gained insights into the cyclical risks emanating from the repo-market, central banks faced opposition by both market regulators and the financial industry. This transformed their attempts at regulation into a mere large-scale research endeavor, requiring them to prove the procyclical behavior of these markets based on extensive data collection before any action could be taken. Frustrated in their attempts to control the procyclical behavior of these short-term funding markets, central banks actors used their control over the final implementation of Basel III regulations to impose frictions on this market. Occurring by stealth, this structural regulation allowed critical central bankers to overcome the political opposition to these acts. At the same time, it imposed a continuous drag on the liquidity provision by broker-dealers in these markets, imposing a fragility that central banks would have to offset in future emergency lending programs.