Safe Bank

Rapid economic developments combined with the considerable volatility of financial markets and the growing importance of non-quantifiable behavioural factors all suggest that expert knowledge should be leveraged to a greater extent in macroeconomic forecasts.
The purpose of this article is to present the results of the second edition of the “Macroeconomic Challenges and Forecasts for Poland” project. The survey was conducted in December 2018. The article presents a consensus forecast by EFC experts. In addition to traditional macroeconomic forecasts for Poland, it also lists threats to sustainable economic development and financial system stability together with subjective estimates of their probabilities. Using the knowledge and competence of EFC experts, recommendations concerning economic policy measures have been formulated with the aim of mitigating the future impact of the threats identified.

Contemporary pressures to enhance supervision and regulation of financial intermediation are aimed at increasing the efficiency of financial market functioning and the resilience of the global financial system to disturbances in its operation. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impact of financial liberalization on the banking sector efficiency. The analysis answers the following questions: Does financial liberalization affect changes in the banking sector cost/income ratio? How did the relationship between financial liberalization and European banks’ efficiency develop in 1995-2015? The research was conducted for 28 European countries between 1995 and 2015 divided into two periods: before the financial crisis (1995-2008) and after the crisis (2009-2015).

The main input of this research is a stochastic model of a theoretical panel of contributors (banks) to a money market index. The model proved to constitute a useful environment for testing various index formulae, their characteristics and some trade-offs that may arise while deciding on the particular benchmark’s design. It may be also used to evaluate indices without historical data or stress them against different scenarios of adverse changes in market conditions or panellists’ behaviour. The hypothetical problems with changes in the panel’s composition as well as the irregularity of daily contributions may strongly influence the utility of a final benchmark to be used in medium and long term loan contracts, especially with retail clients. Our focus is on several selected classes of benchmarks’ formulae that are derived from the raw index and allow for some confinement of the mentioned drawbacks while decreasing quality measured by other criteria (the goodness of fit). The set of classes include: the geometric time weights with different smoothing parameters and observation window’s length used on the original raw index, stabilisation of the raw index in bands, rolling window volume weights rebalancing and finally the geometric time weights performed on log-volume transformed index. The potential trade-offs in such a benchmark’s stabilisation efforts are shown

The aim of the research was to investigate price, liquidity and information spillover within the cryptocurrency market. Since from the introduction of bitcoin, many other cryptocurrencies have emerged, there appears a question, whether the market is and will be dominated by Bitcoin, while other cryptocurrencies are only marginal and follow the price, liquidity and overall dynamics of Bitcoin, or can they be possibly used to portfolio diversification. The article contributes also to the debate on the possibility of contagion across the cryptocurrency market. By measuring and quantifying the spillovers of prices, information and liquidity among the cryptocurrencies, we try to investigate the strength of influence of the separate currencies on the whole system. The following cryptocurrencies traded in Bitfinex were taken it account: Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin, Dashcoin and Monero. All the prices were expressed in US dollars. The period of the study covers one year, from May 2017 to May 2018. Liquidity was measured by Volume over Volatility measure, while information inflow through volume traded. Volume of spillovers were computed according to the methodology proposed by Diebold and Yilmaz. The study suggest strong co-movement across the currencies and high and relatively stable value of spillover indices.

In Poland, over the past four years, we have been witnessing liberalization of the laws on consumer bankruptcy which results in an increased number of declared bankruptcies and there are many indications that both the phenomena will only grow. This paper deals with some major manifestations of such a process and shows that a very significant effect of liberalizing the law and bankruptcy regime adopted in Poland is the fact that natural persons conducting business activity increasingly perceive consumer bankruptcy as a chance to get out of financial trouble. Taking advantage of such a solution is, among other things, hindered by the entrepreneur’s failing to file a petition for bankruptcy declaration within 30 days of becoming „insolvent”. As the findings of the conducted interviews show, entrepreneurs are not at all aware of the obligation to lodge petitions in a timely manner. In the light of the experience gained, it seems indispensable to stress the importance of educating natural persons about financial issues and insolvency procedures. The results obtained indicate the need to equalize bankruptcy proceedings for all natural persons, regardless of whether they are or are not entrepreneurs, and play an important role in the current discussion on the government’s draft act of 18 April 2018 on further liberalization of the bankruptcy law.