Council on Foreign Relations

This Squam Lake Working Group Paper endorses legislation that would give authorities the necessary powers to effect an orderly resolution of large complex financial institutions. As part of this authority, every such institution should be required to create “living wills” that would help authorities address the difficulties that might arise in a resolution.

Retirement saving is undergoing a fundamental change as employers shift from defined benefit pension plans to defined contribution plans, such as 401(k) accounts. This Working Paper, the sixth in the Squam Lake Working Group series distributed by the Center for Geoeconomic Studies, analyzes the pros and cons of defined contribution plans and recommends measures that will improve the performance of the nation's retirement saving system.

Credit default swaps (CDS) are contracts that provide protection against the risk of default by borrowers. The failure of one important participant in the CDS market can destabilize the financial system by inflicting significant losses on many trading partners simultaneously. A clearinghouse could in theory reduce counterparty risk by standing between the buyer and seller of protection, insulating the counterparties’ exposure to each other’s default. This Working Paper, the fifth in the Squam Lake Working Group series distributed by the Center for Geoeconomic Studies, analyzes the market for credit default swaps and makes specific recommendations about appropriate roles for clearinghouses and about how they should be organized.

Financial regulations in almost all countries are designed to ensure the soundness of individual institutions, principally commercial banks, against the risk of loss on their assets. This focus on individual firms ignores critical interactions between institutions and can also cause regulators to overlook important changes in the overall financial system. The solution: One regulatory organization in each country should be responsible for overseeing the health and stability of the overall financial system. This Working Paper, the fourth in the Squam Lake Working Group series distributed by the Center for Geoeconomic Studies, argues that the central bank should be charged with this important new responsibility.

This Working Paper, the third in the Squam Lake Working Group series distributed by the Center for Geoeconomic Studies, recommends support for a new regulatory hybrid security that will expedite the recapitalization of distressed financial companies. The new instrument resembles long-term debt in normal times, but converts to equity when the financial system and the issuing bank are both under financial stress. The regulatory hybrid security the authors envision would be transparent, less costly to taxpayers, and more effective than the ad hoc measures taken in the current crisis.

This Working Paper, the second in a series from the Squam Lake Working Group distributed by the Center for Geoeconomic Studies, argues that regulators consider systemic effects when setting bank capital requirements. Everything else the same, capital requirements should be proportionately higher for larger banks, banks that hold more illiquid assets, and banks that finance more of their operations with short-term debt. But capital requirements are not free. When designing capital requirements that address systemic concerns, regulators must weigh the costs such requirements impose on banks during good times against the benefit of having more capital in the financial system when a crisis strikes.

Information about prices and quantities of assets lies at the heart of well-functioning capital markets. In the current financial crisis, it has become clear that many important actors—both firms and regulatory agencies—have not had sufficient information. Distributed by the Center for Geoeconomic Studies, this Working Paper proposes a new regulatory regime for gathering and disseminating financial market information. The authors argue that government regulators need a new infrastructure to collect and analyze adequate information from large (systemically important) financial institutions. This new information framework would bolster the government’s ability to foresee, contain, and, ideally, prevent disruptions to the overall financial services industry.