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More work is needed to tackle risks outside the banking sector, according to a Bank of England study which found that a market crisis would be amplified by fire sales of assets by pension funds, hedge funds and other investors.
The BoE said a sharp rise in sovereign and corporate bond yields caused by “a sudden crystallisation of geopolitical tensions” would cause “significant losses” for non-bank institutions — such as pensions funds, hedge funds and private equity firms — forcing many to sell assets and amplify the shock.
The exercise required a group of more than 50 City of London institutions to model how a period of intense stress would ripple through the increasingly important non-bank sector. It underlines how regulators are shifting their focus to risks arising outside the banking system.
The so-called system-wide exploratory scenario (SWES) — which included the theoretical default of a hedge fund — follows several big market upheavals due to fallout from the pandemic and recent geopolitical turmoil.
Governor Andrew Bailey said on Friday that the BoE was concerned about the “increased risk of global fragmentation”. US president-elect Donald Trump has threatened to raise tariffs on imports from countries including Mexico, Canada and China, fuelling fears of a hit to economic growth.
The BoE warned trade tensions “could weigh on growth and increase uncertainty of economic outcomes, including around inflation, which could feed into volatility in financial markets”, as well as causing “disruptions to cross-border capital flows”.
Bailey said its “world-leading” exercise to model risks from non-banks had “revealed several mismatches in expectations among market participants”, adding that it also “highlighted a number of remaining risks and vulnerabilities that will be important to address”.
The BoE said resilience was “comparatively high” in some areas, including money market funds, insurers and liability-driven investment (LDI) funds in pension schemes, because of lower debt levels.
But it said non-banks could still cause “greater amplification” of future shocks. One concern is the risk of liquidity drying up in the repo market, in which financial groups can raise money against assets such as gilts. Another worry, according to the BoE, is that the corporate bond market could seize up due to heavy selling by investors.
It warned of “a significant mismatch in expectations in the gilt repo market”, reflecting a risk that even “large, sophisticated” investors would have “less access to finance in a stress than they expect”.
More than half of fund managers in the exercise expected to have access to more financing via repo markets in a crisis, according to the BoE. But it said over a third of banks indicated they would not provide extra repo capacity and some lenders said they would not renew existing financing.
The scenario modelled in the exercise was more severe than the crisis triggered in 2022 after the then-UK prime minister Liz Truss’s “mini” Budget, which forced the BoE to intervene to contain surging gilt yields and a sharp fall in sterling.
The BoE also addressed rising concerns about the interconnectedness between private equity and life insurance. Large US buyout groups including Apollo Global Management and KKR have expanded into insurance since the financial crisis as the sector offers low cost and long term financing that private equity groups can use to boost their lending.
But regulators and policymakers have urged caution and warned that such firms could be more vulnerable to a credit downturn because they are leveraged and typically own a larger proportion of illiquid assets.
“Complexity and lack of transparency in these arrangements mean they have the potential to increase the fragility of parts of the global insurance sector and to pose systemic risks if the underlying vulnerabilities are not addressed,” the BoE said.
The findings were released alongside the results of the BoE’s latest stress test of banks, which showed they could comfortably withstand two crisis scenarios, as the central bank said it would shift to doing such tests every two years instead of annually.