Abstract

Illiquidity is at the core of the various currency and banking/financial crises of the 1990s. In the wake of the Asian crisis of 1997/98 the term "systemic liquidity" has been coined to refer to adequate arrangements and practices which permit efficient liquidity management and which provide a buffer during financial distress. A constructed balance-sheet-based variable that captures the essence of the risk from systemic liquidity is funding volatility ratio, FVR. Using data covering January 1990 to October 2003 and employing cointegration techniques, this study attempts to quantify the purported link between FVR and the measurable determinants of a balanced liquidity infrastructure for Indonesia, the country that suffered the most from the Asian crisis. A good fit is obtained for the dynamic regression model and estimates of short-run and long-run impacts and elasticities are computed. FVR has trended upwards and also is shown to be increasing in the interest rate, foreign liabilities: total asset ratio and the Jakarta stock market index, and decreasing in capital:asset ratio, the rupiah-US dollar exchange rate and the number of banks. The foremost requirement for lowering the FVR is a steady exchange rate followed by increases in bank capital.

pdf

Share