“Let’s say you were trying to make a personal budget. We can imagine two reasonable ideas you would want to incorporate into this budget. The first is that you want to make sure you can pay your bills if your income suddenly freezes up or you suddenly need cash. You want to make sure your savings are sufficiently liquid in case there is an emergency.
Another rule is that you want your time horizon of your debts to match what you are buying with those debts. You don’t want a 4-year mortgage and a 30-year auto loan; you want a 4-year auto loan and a 30-year mortgage. And for our purposes, you really don’t want to buy either on a credit card, since the payment terms can fluctuate so often in the short term.
These two ideas are behind two of the additional special forms of capital requirements designed by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision in Basel III. The first is a “Liquidity Coverage Ratio” (LCR), which is designed to make sure that a financial firm has sufficiently liquid resources to survive a crisis where financial liquidity has dried up for 30 days. The second is a “Net Stable Funding Ratio,” which is designed to complement the first rule and seeks to incentivize banks to use funds with more stable debts featuring long-term horizons.”
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Read Mike Konczal’s full blog post for the Roosevelt Institute here
