Ulster Bank's Loan Losses

Ulster Bank, founded in 1836, has been one of Ireland's most successful banks over the past 175 years. However, yesterday it announced that it had written off more than £1 billion of bad loans (mainly in the property sector) in the first nine months of 2011. Click here for further details.

Along with Charles Hickson, I have examined the corporate governance of Irish banks (including the Ulster Bank) in the nineteenth century (click here). Bank directors back then had incentives to ensure that their banks did not take excessive risk, which could potentially result in large loan losses. First, directors were usually shareholders, holding about circa 1% of shares each, which meant that they stood to lose wealth if their bank performed poorly. Second, they did not receive stock options or remuneration tied to performance. Third, as with all bank shareholders at the time, they had unlimited liability, which meant they stood to lose everything (right down to their 'last acre and sixpence') if the bank failed. Fourth, banks were allowed to fail - there was no deposit insurance or bank bailouts, which meant that bank directors and shareholders bore the full cost of their risk-taking decisions.

The Economics of Global Warming

The Berkeley Earth Project , an independent study of global warming, has found that the earth has become a degree warmer over the past half century. However, the statistical uncertainty surrounding pre-1920 estimates makes it very hard to say much about long-term trends - click here for graph . This is one of my concerns with the global warming debate - we simply don't have trustworthy long-run data which looks at temperature changes over the last millennium (or two). My second concern with the global warming debate is that it is very hard to prove any sort of casual link between global warming and human activity. The scientists may be able to show correlation between global warming and our production of carbon dioxides etc., but correlation is not causation. My third concern with the debate is that those who are sceptical or agnostic are stereotyped as flat-earthers or intellectually-challenged crackpots. This only stifles debate and the progress of science itself.

Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles

Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles, co-authored with my colleague Will Quinn , is forthcoming in August. It is published by Cambridge University Press and is available for pre-order at Amazon , Barnes and Noble , Waterstones and Cambridge University Press .

The Failure of Herstatt Bank

As an undergraduate, I was taught about the failure of Herstatt Bank in 1974 and Herstatt risk. This bank was only the 35th largest bank in Germany at the time so why would anyone be interested in studying its failure? Herstatt failed because of its involvement in risky foreign exchange business. When it closed its doors on 26 June 1974, counterparty banks (mainly in New York) had not received dollars due to them because of time-zone differences - this is known as settlement risk. The cross-jurisdictional implications of its failure resulted in the Bank for International Settlements setting up the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and Herstatt's failure was a key reason for the establishment of real-time gross settlements systems, which ensures that payments between two banks are executed in real time. The Bank of England's Ben Norman has an interesting post on Herstatt over at the Bank's new blog ( Bank Underground ). As well as giving an excellent overview of

Finance: Past, Present and Future

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