On May 16, 2016, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published a post on its Liberty Street Economics blog assessing the impact of interagency guidance intended to curtail leveraged lending issued by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Federal Reserve Board and the FDIC in March of 2013. The post shows that banks, in particular the largest institutions, cut leveraged lending while nonbanks increased such lending after the guidance. During the same period of time, nonbanks increased their borrowing from banks, possibly to finance their growing leveraged lending activity. The post notes that this evidence highlights an important challenge of macroprudential policies. Since those policies reach beyond individual banks and target risk in the entire banking system, they are more likely to trigger significant responses that may have unintended consequences.
The New York Fed post is available at: http://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2016/05/did-the-supervisory-guidance-on-leveraged-lending-work.html.
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