The attached report and background paper respond to a request made by the G20 Leaders in April 2009 to develop guidance for national authorities to assess the systemic importance of financial institutions, markets and instruments. The report outlines conceptual and analytical approaches to the assessment of systemic importance and discusses a possible form for general guidelines.
The report recognizes that current knowledge and concerns about moral hazard limit the extent to which very precise guidance can be developed. Assessments of systemic importance will necessarily involve a high degree of judgment, they will likely be time-varying and state-dependent, and they will reflect the purpose of the assessment. The report does not pre-judge the policy actions to which such assessments could be an input.
The report suggests that the guidelines could take the form of high level principles that would be sufficiently flexible to apply to a broad range of countries and circumstances, and it outlines the possible coverage of such guidelines. A set of such high level principles appropriate for a variety of policy uses could be developed, further, by the IMF, BIS and FSB, taking account of experience with the application of the conceptual and analytical approaches described here.
There are a number of policy issues where an assessment of systemic importance would be useful. One critical issue is the ongoing work to reduce the moral hazard posed by systemically important institutions. The FSB and the international standard setters are developing measures that can be taken to reduce the systemic risks these institutions pose, and the attached papers will provide a useful conceptual and analytical framework to inform policy discussions. A second area is the work to address information gaps that were exposed by the recent crisis (the subject of a separate report to the G20 from IMF staff and the FSB Secretariat), where assessments of systemic importance can help to inform data collection needs. A third area is in helping to identify sources of financial sector risk that could have serious macroeconomic consequences. We will keep you informed on our respective future policy work in these important areas. Continue reading