Optimal bank recovery

Banks’ living wills involve both recovery and resolution. Since it may not always be clear when recovery plans or actions should be triggered, there is a role for an objective metric to trigger recovery. We outline how such a metric could be constructed meeting criteria of (i) adequate loss absorption; (ii) distinguishing between weak and sound banks; (iii) little susceptibility to manipulation; (iv) timeliness; (v) scalable from the individual bank to the system. We show how this would have worked in the U.K., during 2007–11. This approach has the added advantage that it could be extended to encompass a whole ladder of sanctions of increasing severity as capital erodes.