During the recent financial crises, government guarantees helped reduce the funding costs of banks by providing them with insurance, thus curbing panic in banking systems and financial markets. This column argues, however, that these beneficial effects can be attenuated when guarantees are risky in the sense that they offer weaker protection in recessions, when the guarantor is more vulnerable, or the guarantees are less certain. Using a large international panel of banks, a significant risk premium is found to be associated with implicit government guarantees.

Following the Global Crisis, countries have significantly increased their efforts to cooperate on bank supervision, the prime example being the euro area’s Single Supervisory Mechanism. However, little is known about whether such cooperation helps improve the stability of the financial system. Using panel data for a large sample of cross-border banks, this column examines whether a higher incidence of supervisory cooperation is associated with higher bank stability. It finds that supervisory cooperation is effective, working through asset risk, but not for very large banks, which are the ones that pose the highest risk to financial stability.