Measuring Shadow Banking in the Irish National Accounts

Updated: November 2017

Introduction

The importance of the financial sector and its constituent parts has been reinforced by the recent financial crisis. This note provides more disaggregated data on the subsectors of the financial sector in Ireland, and provides estimates of shadow banking activity¹. In particular, providing data on treasuries and special purpose entities, which form part of ‘Other Financial Intermediaries’. Here we look at the Irish financial sector in the context of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) work to incorporate shadow banking, as defined by the Financial Stability Board (FSB) within the national accounts framework.

Shadow Banking has been defined by the FSB in its broadest definition as “credit intermediation involving entities and activities outside the regular banking system” (FSB, 2015). This estimate is approximated by all non-bank financial intermediation including investment funds, insurance companies, pension funds and other financial intermediaries. The FSB introduced a narrow definition of shadow banking defined as “a system of credit intermediation that involves entities and activities outside the regular banking system, and raises i) systemic risk concerns, in particular by maturity/liquidity transformation, leverage and imperfect credit risk, and/ or ii) regulatory arbitrage concerns” (FSB, 2011). Full details of these definitions are described in OECD (2016).

^{*Excluding Brass plate companies and Holding companies (€39bn).
#Excludes Equity funds (€612bn). Those remaining are Bond or fixed income funds, Hedge funds or Other funds.}

 

The OECD has been working with the FSB to explore how shadow banking activity can be measured within the national accounts framework. Shadow banking is largely defined by the FSB according to functions which do not fall neatly within the subsector approach applied with national accounts. Based on the OECD work in which CSO participated, a broad measure of shadow banking can be derived by excluding those subsectors, not involved in credit intermediation outside the banking sector, namely central banks (S.121), deposit taking corporations (S.122) and financial auxiliaries (S.126).

The Data

The primary sources for the data presented in this note are the Central Statistics Office (CSO) National Accounts, CSO Balance of Payments surveys and the Central Bank of Ireland (CBI) Statistics Department Surveys. The data is classified using the European System of Accounts standards (ESA2010) which is consistent with the United Nations System of National Accounts (SNA2008). These classifications enable this presentation of shadow banking to be consistently produced across countries.

The image above shows the financial sectors included in the broad and narrow measures of shadow banking for 2015 asset positions (2016 vintage). Initially, all financial sectors (S.12) are considered and grouped according to their published estimates. After removing banks and financial auxiliaries, we have a reduced estimate from €4,597bn to €3,884bn.

Next we want to remove the areas that are not included in the narrow definition of shadow banking, as defined by the FSB. The Insurance Corporations and Pension Funds sectors are removed along with Brass Plate Companies, Holding Companies and Equity Investment Funds. The remaining sectors are those that are considered in the FSB’s narrow definition as areas that are potentially shadow banking. The remaining provisional estimate of €2,858bn is large, though this is reflective of the type of behaviour present in the Irish economy. The data in the image above is also shown in Table 1 along with the corresponding sector breakdowns for the years 2012, 2013 and 2014. The areas included in the narrow definition of shadow banking are compared for these years in Figure 2.

An increase in the shadow banking sector is seen from 2013 to 2015. This is largely driven by an increase in the Non-MMF Investment Funds sector (S.124). Note that part of this increase is due to the change in reporting basis of derivatives which moved from reporting derivative positions on a gross rather than on a net basis (see CSO, 2016 for further details).

Developments

Future work will look at the breakdown of those sectors in the narrow definition of shadow banking by instrument and resident/non-resident positions. This may be useful to monitor to what extent the relevant units are engaged in shadow banking activities. A further breakdown of the data will be considered via from-whom-to-whom matrices (i.e. the interconnectedness of the financial sectors). This may reveal to what extent assets in the financial system are financed by the financial system itself and what part is transferred to final investors outside the financial system. An example of this methodology can be seen in Boer’s (2016) work on shadow banking in the Dutch National Accounts.

Footnotes

¹This information note represents preliminary work carried out to comply with the OECD’s request for evidence of shadow banking in the Irish National Accounts.

²There are minor differences in vintage and classifications in the financial sector data used by both institutions.

References

Boer, Paul den (2016) Shadow Banking in the Dutch National Accounts. 

Central Bank of Ireland (2016), Macro-financial Review (2016:II). 

Central Statistics Office, Ireland (2016), Assets and Liabilities of the Financial Sector. 

Financial Stability Board (2011), Shadow Banking: Strengthening Oversight and Regulation – Recommendations of the Financial Stability Board. 

Financial Stability Board (2015), Global Shadow Banking Monitoring Report 2015. 

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (2016), How to capture shadow banking in the system of National Accounts (unpublished)