IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/tky/fseres/2006cf398.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Micro-aspects of Monetary Policy in Pre-war Japan: Lender of Last Resort and Selection of Banks

Author

Listed:
  • Tetsuji Okazaki

    (Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo)

Abstract

The central bank as the Lender of Last Resort (LLR) is faced with a trade off between the stability of the financial system and the "moral hazard" of banks. In this paper we explore how this trade off was dealt with by the Bank of Japan (BOJ) in the pre-war period, and how LLR lending by the BOJ affected the financial system. In particular, this paper focuses on the following two stylized facts of Japanese financial history. First, the BOJ actively intervened in the market as the LLR under the unstable financial system in the 1920s. Second, in this period, the financial market worked well to sort out inefficient banks through failures. In providing an LLR loan, the BOJ adopted the policy of favoring those banks that had an already established transaction relationship with the BOJ. At the same time, the BOJ was selective about which banks it would enter into a transaction relationship with. That is, the BOJ chose the banks it would conduct transactions with based on criteria that included profitability, liquidity, quality of assets, and the personal assets of directors. Furthermore, the BOJ did not hesitate to suspend transaction relationships with those banks whose performance declined. This policy enabled the BOJ to act as the LLR without impairing the function of the market to sort out inefficient banks. Whereas the transaction relationship with the BOJ affected a bank's survivability, the effect was not across the board. That is, the transaction relationship did not increase the survivability of a bank directly, but it increased the influence of profitability and liquidity on survivability, especially in a period of financial crisis. This implies that the BOJ bailed out only those transaction counterparts that were profitable and prudent when the financial system was especially unstable. It is suggested that through concentrating LLR lending on its transaction counterparts, the BOJ could successfully bail out only those banks which were illiquid but solvent, and thereby avoided the moral hazard that the LLR policy might otherwise have incurred.

Suggested Citation

  • Tetsuji Okazaki, 2006. "Micro-aspects of Monetary Policy in Pre-war Japan: Lender of Last Resort and Selection of Banks," CIRJE F-Series CIRJE-F-398, CIRJE, Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo.
  • Handle: RePEc:tky:fseres:2006cf398
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.cirje.e.u-tokyo.ac.jp/research/dp/2006/2006cf398.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Sawada, Michiru, 2010. "Liquidity risk and bank portfolio management in a financial system without deposit insurance: Empirical evidence from prewar Japan," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 19(3), pages 392-406, June.
    2. Tetsuji Okazaki & Michiru Sawada, 2012. "Interbank networks in prewar Japan: structure and implications," Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC, vol. 21(2), pages 463-506, April.
    3. Marc Flandreau & Stefano Ugolini, 2011. "Where it all began: lending of last resort and the Bank of England during the Overend-Gurney panic of 1866," Working Paper 2011/03, Norges Bank.
    4. Yokoyama, Kazuki, 2007. "Too Big to Fail: the Panic of 1927," MPRA Paper 2768, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    5. Christopher Hoag, 2015. "Clearinghouse Loan Certificates as a Lender of Last Resort," Working Papers 1503, Trinity College, Department of Economics, revised Jun 2015.
    6. Marc Flandreau & Stefano Ugolini, 2013. "Where It All Began: Lending of Last Resort and Bank of England Monitoring During the Overend-Gurney Panic of 1866," Post-Print hal-01293916, HAL.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:tky:fseres:2006cf398. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CIRJE administrative office (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ritokjp.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.