Author: David Schwartz J.D. CPA
A working paper published on April 3, 2017 by the US Federal Reserve attempts to quantify the costs and benefits of bank capital to arrive at an estimate of the optimal capital ratio for U.S. banks. In their paper,[1] authors Simon Firestone, Amy Lorenc, and Ben Ranish begin their analysis by estimating to what extent the probability of financial crises falls as bank capital rises and calculate the output costs of a financial crisis. Against this cost, the authors then balance the cost of equity, a more expensive source of funding for banks than debt.