It is widely believed that banks played a central role in the Great Recession, but where is the smoking gun? This column presents evidence from the UK confirming the conventional wisdom. It finds that banks transmitted the unprecedented external funding shock by cutting back on domestic lending.

The authors of CEPR DP8333 assess the optimal level of equity for banks to hold, taking into account costs and benefits both private and social. After considering these overall economic (or social) costs, the authors conclude that desirable equity levels for banks are far higher than actual levels or even target levels under Basel III.

Today's big banks are enormous. By 2008, 12 banks worldwide had liabilities exceeding $1 trillion. This column, using data on banks from 80 countries over the years 1991-2009, provides new evidence on how large banks differ in terms of their risk and return outcomes and investigates how market perceptions of bank risk are affected by bank size. It concludes that policies should reward bank managers for keeping their banks safe rather than for making them big.

How do banks and capital markets interact? This column brings together evidence to show that banks and capital markets, rather than simply being competitors, are in fact complements to each other – a finding that has implications for policy.

Banks and capital markets are often viewed as competitors within the financial system, with some suggesting that each develops at the expense of the other. This column argues that banks and markets exhibit three forms of interaction. They compete, they complement each other, and they coevolve.

What brought down Iceland’s banks? This column examines the revelations from the latest report from the Icelandic parliament, raising the possibility that the collapse of Iceland’s three largest banks is the result of “control fraud” where shareholders stole from their own bank in the same way as those convicted of looting from the American saving and loan banks in the late 1980s.

What government agency should decide lender-of-last-resort policy? This column discusses the optimal allocation of decision-making authority, suggesting that the central bank decide emergency loans and the deposit insurance agency guarantee them. But providing greater liquidity assistance will also require punishment to deter moral hazard problems.

Bank balance sheets in oil-exporting economies have been hard hit recently. This column provides the first empirical evidence linking oil prices to bank performance in such economies. It suggests that easily observed oil prices could inform macro-prudential regulation in these countries and mitigate pro-cyclical bank lending.

The financial crisis has reinvigorated a debate on the effectiveness of our accounting and regulatory frameworks. This column shows that banks, hoping to preserve their book capital, use accounting discretion to systematically understate the impairment of their real-estate-related assets. But the accounting reforms announced thus far are exacerbating the gap between book and market values.

Remittances impact development along a number of dimensions including poverty alleviation, education, and entrepreneurship. However, such transactions are expensive. This column shows that a bigger stock of migrants and more competition are associated with lower transaction costs. It says policymakers should focus on improving competition in the remittance market, as regulations have only a limited effect.