Safe Bank

Excessive procyclicality of the financial system (and aggregated systemic risk) is a source of financial instability. Limiting excessive procyclicality is a prerequisite for stable economic growth. Currently the task of curbing procyclicality has been assigned to macroprudential supervision. The efficacy of macroprudential policy depends on the ability of correct estimation of aggregated systemic risk. This paper focuses on methods which help to quantify this risk and aims to assess those methods. The analysis conducted in this article leads to the conclusion that early warning indicators, such as credit to GDP ratio, seem to be acceptable aggregate risk measures, as they are leading indicators. VARs and macro stress testing may be used as complementary tools. Their shortcoming is the inability to track non linearity of feedback effects between the financial system and the real economy.

The aim of the article is to compare different approaches towards measuring financial stability by central banks. In addition to that, the results of a comprehensive survey conducted among national central banks in the EU concerning their involvement in safeguarding financial stability are analyzed. The assessment reveals that national central banks in euro area countries are not on average more involved in maintaining financial stability than those in non-euro countries. There is also no strong differentiation in general in the degree of involvement of EU national central banks in financial stability. However, the involvement is the weakest when it comes to measuring financial stability. Quantifying this phenomenon still remains a significant challenge for central banks conducting macroprudential policy.

Fundamental changes in regulations of the financial safety net have been taking place in the European Union. They are intended to ensure safety and stability of the single financial market, a high level of protection of depositors and consumers of financial services, reducing the social costs of insolvency of credit institutions, and also reducing moral hazard by creating mechanisms for early response to irregularities in banks. These are the best reasons for changes made primarily in the European financial supervision architecture. While financial supervision is still an important link in the financial safety net, it is increasingly being entrusted to central banks, which in turn determines alone the treatment of central banks as key financial market institutions protecting against destabilisation. At the level of supranational institution, oversight responsible for exercising complex micro- and macro-prudential, is the European Central Bank. Thus, the merger of monetary policy and oversight in one institution has taken place. This did not modify the existing architecture of the EU financial supervision in structural terms. However this has led to the fact that the ECB has become a strategic element of the European financial safety net.

This paper analyses and conducts an assessment of the drafted bill on macroprudential supervision over the financial system in Poland. This drafted regulation contains the legal framework, aims, tasks and competencies of a new authority – Systemic Risk Board (SRB) – which will probably be responsible for creating domestic macro-prudential policy and exercising macro-prudential supervision in Poland. The SRB will be according to Art. 458 of Regulation CRR a designated authority. The main interests of the Polish legislator by developing modern macroprudential regulation should be focused on ensuring the independence of the SRB, its functional effectiveness and the collaboration with domestic micro-prudential supervision as well. In particular this collaboration will be very important by implementing, as set out in regulation CRD IV/CRR, capital buffers or systemic risk buffers into the domestic legal system. The drafted regulatory framework of the domestic macro-prudential supervision will have a significant impact on the efficiency of macro-prudential domestic policy, and therefore deserves an extensive debate and discussion on the issue.

The purpose of the paper is to characterize the current changes to financial safety nets, brought about by the global financial crisis, in Poland and in other countries. The paper focuses particularly on the legislation concerning financial stability and the widening concept of deposit guarantee.

The global financial crisis has provoked an ongoing and lively political and scientific debate on the legal infrastructure of financial markets with a special emphasis on the banking sector. The main arguments concentrate not only on the idea of how to ensure financial stability but also on the issue of confidence of depositors expressed by their ability to withdraw money before the deposit maturity. Thus, in order to give the deposit guarantee system an extension of mandate to intervene when a bank is failing or is likely to fail, the traditional mode of operation of DGS has radical changes (i.e. BRRD and DGSD) in recent years (especially in EU countries).

Against this backdrop, different DGS models are discussed in the paper in connection with the concept of recovery and resolution. Moreover, the idea of macroprudential policy and microprudential supervision is also analyzed versus the resolution function allocated within the financial safety net.

Savings and credit cooperatives do not constitute a homogenous set. Two of their types have been developed and operate in Poland, i.e. cooperative banks and credit unions. The author decided to identify and classify the similarities and differences between them. As a result of this research – having considered the nature of similarities and differences between cooperative banks and credit unions, as well as the type of information sources constituting the basis for a comparative analysis – three major categories of similarities and differences were distinguished: historical, regulatory and situational. Regardless of the classification into categories, both similarities and differences between cooperative banks and credit unions were divided into permanent and variable, general and specific as well as fundamental and secondary ones. The thus performed segregation allowed for distinguishing, among others, both similarities and differences:

• referring directly to the essence of cooperative banks and credit unions, which – owing to their fundamental importance – were subject to a detailed analysis and characteristics, and also
• historical and covering the effective norms for cooperative banks and credit unions functioning, which were also discussed since they determine the first ones to a significant extent.