Category Archives: News

Systemically important banks get better terms for their overnight borrowing

By Kimmo Soramäki | Published: July 2, 2010
A new paper by Farooq Akram and Casper Christophersen entitled “Interbank overnight interest rates – gains from systemic importance” analyses the Norwegian overnight interbank interest rates paid by banks. They find that during the Financial crisis, the interest rates were substantially below indicative quotes of interest rates provided by major banks. The interest rate variation [...]
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IMF report on using network models as basis for charges on systemically important banks

By Kimmo Soramäki | Published: May 10, 2010
Recently the idea has been floated that systemically important financial institutions should be charged insurance premia to cover for government support in times of stress. The recent IMF report (April 2010) for G20 ministers now suggests that: A risk-adjusted rate could be designed to address the contribution to systemic risk. Ideally, the rate would vary according [...]
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Europe’s web of debt in New York Times

By Kimmo Soramäki | Published: May 10, 2010
New YorkTimes (1 May 2010) published a great visualization (Bill Marsh / The New York Times) of the debt relationships between European countries based on public data by BIS. Its reproduced below. The Visual Science series of New York Times has many other captivating visualizations of data as well.
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ECB promotes research on emerging front: “Too networked to fail”

By Kimmo Soramäki | Published: January 18, 2010
The ECB conference “Recent advances in modelling systemic risk using network analysis” was featured today in Securities Operations Week – a weekly publication focused on US and global securities operations, technology and compliance: “The financial crisis that began to emerge in 2007 and that gained steam in 2008 famously gave rise to the oft-cited slogan “too [...]
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Wrapping up 2009

By Kimmo Soramäki | Published: December 19, 2009
The year is coming to an end and it a good time to look back at how this blog evolved during the year. I started it in March 2008 mainly as my personal blog but as I noticed that most of the articles covered financial networks in one sense or another, and that there was [...]
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SNA conferences for 2010

By Kimmo Soramäki | Published: November 11, 2009
A few conference announcements from INSNA mailing list: NetSciCom 2010, Second IEEE International Workshop on Network Science For Communication Networks, March 19, 2010 – San Diego, CA, USA 6th UK Social Networks Conference to take place at University of Manchester from 12th to 16th of April 2010. Workshop on Financial Networks and Risk Assessment, May 19.21, 2010 in Toronto [...]
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The Feasibility of Systemic Risk Measurement

By Kimmo Soramäki | Published: November 3, 2009
A testimony by Andrew Lo for the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee for its hearing on systemic risk regulation, held October 29, 2009. It proposes two major measures that could alleviate the next big financial crisis. First, new legislation that provides more transparency on a confidential basis to regulators on financial institutions activities. This would [...]
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European Systemic Risk Board to be established

By Kimmo Soramäki | Published: September 23, 2009
A proposal for a new EU institution, European Systemic Risk Board, was published on 23 September 2009. The proposed body will have the mandate to map financial risks and their concentration at the system level for the macro-prudential supervision of systemic stability. European Union central banks will have a prominent role in it and the Secretariat [...]
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Is network theory the best hope for regulating systemic risk?

By Kimmo Soramäki | Published: July 10, 2009
I was recently interviewed for the article by Christopher Wright, now published in the CFA magazine (July/August 2009, Vol. 20, No. 4) and entitled "Six degrees of rumination – Is network theory the best hope for regulating systemic risk?". The article discusses whether and how network theory can be used to develop a "financial network [...]
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The Financial Crisis and the Systemic Failure of Academic Economics

By Kimmo Soramäki | Published: March 10, 2009
I got my hands on this excellent "opinion paper" entitled "The Financial Crisis and the Systemic Failure of Academic Economics" by eight well known economists (Dahlem report). The paper outlines what went wrong with economics and finance in retrospect to the current crisis, and track it back (kindly said) to the failure of economics to [...]
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