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12 12, 2023

DAILY121223

2023-12-12T17:09:22-05:00December 12th, 2023|2- Daily Briefing|

IMF Calls for Enhanced Climate-Risk Analyses, Stress-Testing

Calling for implementation of the Basel Committee’s climate-related financial risk principles (see FSM Report CLIMATE14), the IMF’s Monetary and Capital Markets Department Director, Tobias Adrian, today pressed central banks to enhance their climate risk analyses and adapt stress-testing frameworks to better reflect climate-financial risk transmission and amplification channels.

Agencies Come Under Still More Workplace-Practice Scrutiny, Political Pressure

As we noted last week, House Republicans are now using ongoing assertions of FDIC workplace dysfunction to attack the OCC.

HFSC Subcomm Considers Sanctions Enforcement

Today’s HFSC National Security Subcommittee hearing focused primarily on critiques of US energy sanctions enforcement related to Russia, Iran, and Venezuela.

House Select Committee Calls on Fed to Stress Test China Risk

The House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party today released a bipartisan report urging Congress to direct the Fed to stress-test U.S. banks for their ability to withstand Chinese market risk, produce classified reports on these assessments, and consider the financial market impact of potential sanctions on Chinese financial firms.

Basel Proposes Modest Fix to IRR Standards, Post-SVB Revisions Await

As anticipated, the Basel Committee today released a consultation revising global interest-rate risk (IRR), standards updating current banking-book standards (see FSM Report IRR7) to toughen the IRR-shock calibration.

McKernan Extends Capital Olive Branch

FDIC Director McKernan today offered an end-game compromise that might actually lead to final rules in 2024 that defer some of the …

28 03, 2022

Karen Petrou: Why the Fed Might Bail Out the Commodity Market

2023-03-27T15:57:01-04:00March 28th, 2022|The Vault|

In the midst of chaos, volatility always makes matters worse and this is very much the case with the commodities sector.  This has led to growing speculation that central banks will step in should unprecedented price swings show signs of systemic impact.  As we noted, we don’t know a central banker that wants to bail out commodities.  But none of them wanted to bail out anyone else either.  If market stress turns systemic, then central banks will step in.  Indeed, they may intervene even if stress seems manageable if they also believe that public welfare is at risk when core commodities go from pricey to prohibitive.

In the U.S., the Fed will resist calls to backstop commodities companies or traders for as long as it can by citing what it believes to be its limited mandate even as it argues that its anti-inflation policies will stabilize markets – just you wait.  However, whatever the Fed is able to do about inflation will take time and whatever it does about its portfolio to address inflation will exacerbate commodity-market stress.

Three possible sources of extreme volatility are already on the horizon.

First, there’s the liquidity stress sparked by CCP margin demands.  This was the culprit in the letter from energy traders to the European Central Bank and it’s at least as much of a factor in the U.S.  The more commodity-market volatility, the higher clearinghouse initial and variation margin demands and the harder it is to post eligible assets already scarce …

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