Procyclicality
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Bank supervision - capital adequacy - leverage.
The tendency of financial systems to amplify fluctuations in the economic cycle.
- Interaction and amplification
- "Herd behaviour has long been known to be an essential feature of financial markets.
- More subtly, individual reactions, by themselves rational, can, by the virtue of their mutual interaction, produce strong amplification effects.
- A broader definition of procyclicality would thus encompass three components, which cannot easily be distinguished in real life:
- (1) fluctuations around the trend
- (2) changes in the trend itself and
- (3) possible cumulative deviations from equilibrium value.
- This points to the policy challenges regulators face.
- They have to try and identify when pure cyclical fluctuations morph into something different: either a change in the trend itself or the start of a cumulative process."
- Jean-Pierre Landau, Deputy Governor of the Bank of France, BIS Review 94/2009.
