Risk and Liquidity
Clarendon Lectures in Finance Series

This book presents the Clarendon Lectures in Finance by one of the leading exponents of financial booms and crises. Hyun Song Shin's work has shed light on the global financial crisis and he has been a central figure in the policy debates. The paradox of the global financial crisis is that it erupted in an era when risk management was at the core of the management of the most sophisticated financial institutions. This book explains why. The severity of the crisis is explained by financial development that put marketable assets at the heart of the financial system, and the increased sophistication of financial institutions that held and traded the assets. Step by step, the lectures build an analytical framework that take the reader through the economics behind the fluctuations in the price of risk and the boom-bust dynamics that follow. The book examines the role played by market-to-market accounting rules and securitisation in amplifying the crisis, and draws lessons for financial architecture, financial regulation and monetary policy. This book will be of interest to all serious students of economics and finance who want to delve beneath the outward manifestations to grasp the underlying dynamics of the boom-bust cycle in a modern financial system - a system where banking and capital market developments have become inseparable.

1. Nature of Financial Risk. 2. Value-at-Risk Capital. 3. Boom and Bust Driven by Value-at-Risk. 4. Dynamic Hedging. 5. Asset-Liability Management. 6. Financial System. 7. Lending Booms. 8. The Case of Northern Rock. 9. Securitisation and the Financial System. 10. A Fresh Start.

Hyun Song Shin is Economic Adviser and Head of Research at the Bank for International Settlements. Before joining the BIS, he was the Hughes-Rogers Professor of Economics at Princeton University. He is a leading exponent of financial booms and crises, and has been a leading figure in the policy debates during the financial crisis. He has written extensively for both an academic and practitioner audience on financial risk, financial regulation, and monetary policy. He has served as editor or editorial board member of several scholarly journals, and has served in an advisory capacity to central banks and policy organizations on financial stability issues. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society and of the British Academy.

In the Great Recession, the world has looked for leading economists to offer a new and better understanding of macroeconomic instability, as Keynes did in the Great Depression. In this book, Hyun Song Shin delivers what was needed. Step by step, he develops a new comprehensive understanding of how macroeconomic booms and busts can be derived from microeconomic forces in the banking system. This book should be recognized as a major contribution to macroeconomic theory.