In the last two decades, we have seen a series of banking crises around the world
where banks have become systematically insolvent. Banking crises have occurred in
developed and developing countries alike. Prominently, the Asian crisis of 1997
involved banking crises in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and Korea, with banks
becoming insolvent after economic downturns and currency devaluations.
Systemic bank insolvencies involve huge costs to the banks themselves, their
customers and to governments. Bank failures may lead to the destruction of a bank’s
information capital garnered in previously nurtured bank-customer relationships. A
disruption of bank lending and of the payments system may also cause a reduction in
investment and other economic activity. Further, bank depositors potentially lose heavily
because of bank failures. Last but not least, governments tend to incur large costs in
remedying a banking crisis. To make financial system breakdowns less likely and to
limit their costs if they occur, all countries of the world have financial safety nets in
place. These nets are amalgams of policies including explicit or implicit deposit
insurance, the central bank’s lending of last resort, bank insolvency resolution
procedures, and bank regulation and supervision.