G2 - Financial Institutions and ServicesReturn

Monetary metals have historically been important in providing limits to the quantity of money. The mandatory backing of money with gold or silver was gradually circumvented and abolished. Both precious metals have thus become, among other things, investment assets associated with returns and risks. They may or may not be profitable and safe. The absence of precious metal limits has led to a significantly faster devaluation of money. However, inflation may also be reflected in rising market prices for financial and real assets. This paper analyses the potential interrelationships between inflation, market prices of shares in the S&P 500 index, and market prices of gold over the period 1996-2020 in the United States. The analysis shows a strong impact of inflation on both the stock index and gold. The market price of gold was partly influenced by the development of market stock prices.

Basel III responded to the financial crisis among other by redefining and expanding the capital requirements and by introduction of the liquidity requirements in the banking sector. Since banks' liquidity and capital positions influence each other through assets structure channel, asset quality channel and profitability channel, there exists a significant relationship among capital and liquidity regulatory tools. A bank can improve its capital and liquidity ratios by lowering risk-weighted assets (assets structure channel), but with the negative impact on the interest profit (profitability channel). We therefore aim to test the functionality of these two channels in relation to capital and liquidity positions in the Czech banking sector. We document the effect of the assets structure channel in case of liquidity and capital positions and effect of the profitability channel for the large banks. However, low profitability and introduction of a leverage ratio can limit the effect of assets structure channel on banks´ capital positions.

The aim of this article is to explore main linkages among the participation rate, potential output and pension funding system. Based on the existing literature, there are several possibilities how to render the current set-up of the pension system sustainable. This sustainability is conventionally regarded from the perspective of provision of "satisfactory level" of retirement pensions as well as from the perspective of general budgetary impact. In this respect, demographic change is accounted for owing to the common perception that it has a lot to do with how the future pension system should and will look like. It has been found out that if appropriate economic policy measures ‒ targeting mainly labour market participation rate and long-term unemployment ‒ are adopted, no need for abrupt changes in the existing social security system framework is actually necessary. Also, the linkages between the participation rate and potential output seem to be relatively strong, so that the economy could be easily considered as signifi cantly influenced by its labour market. The functioning of the latter thus seems to be pivotal for the resolution of some long-term economic capacity concerns, including its dynamics.

Financial risk modeling, measuring, and managing are an inherent part of management in financial institutions. It is also an important step within the setting of optimal level of capital eligible to cover risk exposures. A significant portion of capital is usually assigned to cover the risk of unexpected changes in FX rates. FX rates (the returns) commonly exhibit significant skewness and relatively huge kurtosis. In this paper, we apply subordinated Lévy models coupled together by ordinary elliptical copula functions in order to estimate the FX rate risk of normalized portfolio. Selected models are applied in order to estimate the risk ex-post, as well as ex-ante. The models are also compared to the more standard assumption of the joint normal distribution. Although the results for both types of modeling are quite different and Lévy measure is ignored, suggested models deliver us improved risk estimation.

The article deals with the role of the central banks in advanced market economies and the theoretical possibility of abolishing these institutions. Central banks have monopolies in some areas, especially regarding monetary policy. In many countries, central banks also have monopolies in other areas, for example in the payment and clearing transactions for banks and the state. In the context of the financial crises, there have been calls for the abolition of central banks and the restoration of money fully-backed by gold and issued by different subjects. The main reasoning behind these requests is connected with the accusation that central banks have been the basic culprits in the current crisis, because of their monopoly of the issuing money. This argument fails to recognize that central banks do not have a monopoly in issuing money as the dominant share of the money creation is attached with the process of multiplication of demand deposits by commercial banks. Restoration of the money backed by gold is furthermore completely unrealistic. The article discusses the shortage of gold stock as one of many reasons why gold is not suitable for monetary purposes.

In general, there exist many ways to detect the fair value of financial derivatives. However, each of them is suitable for different purposes. For example, when the payoff function is not very simple or the underlying process is too complex, the approach of Monte Carlo simulation can be useful. Unfortunately, the plain Monte Carlo simulation needs a very high number of independent paths to get reliable results. It is the reason why an improvement of the plain approach should be applied to decrease the number of paths required in order to get reliable results. In this paper we study more closely several such approaches and examine their potential of increasing the efficiency. To be more exact, we apply the antithetic variates method and stratified sampling approaches, including their combinations in order to get the fair price of a plain vanilla call. We consider three distinct underlying processes: geometric Brownian motion, variance gamma model and normal inverse Gaussian model. We also verify the confidence interval for the option price. We did not find any improvements of examined methods for complex processes considering the definition via two or more independent random numbers. However, if the required accuracy is very high, it might be useful to apply the stratification to the distribution function of the complex process.