The confidence paper is up December 28, 2011 at 7:12 pm
The solvency/liquidity spiral was a major mode of large financial institution failure during the 2008 financial crisis. Many institutions began the crisis with significant funding liquidity risk. Initially unjustified investor doubts over an institution’s solvency caused a loss of confidence. This in turn caused the price and availability of funding to deteriorate, until in some cases this lead to failure. Thus a key factor in financial institution distress was loss of confidence caused by investor uncertainty over solvency.
As we show, the official accounts of the failures of Lehman Brothers and RBS provide substantial evidence for this failure mode. Our model has implications for confidence-enhancing regulatory and accounting policy, which we discuss. In particular, it suggests that minimum required capital is needed to keep investor confidence in a firm, and thus only capital above the minimum is available to absorb losses.
The full version is here.
Any comments would be much appreciated.
(Irritating geeky note: some folks have had some problems in the past with PDFs saved from Word 2010 not being readable on ipads. I think I have cured this problem here by saving an ISO 19005-1 compliant PDF, but please let me know if I haven’t.)