Systemic risk

In finance, systemic risk is the risk of collapse of an entire financial system or entire market, as opposed to risk associated with any one individual entity, group or component of a system, that can be contained therein without harming the entire system. It can be defined as 'financial system instability, potentially catastrophic, caused or exacerbated by idiosyncratic events or conditions in financial intermediaries'. It refers to the risks imposed by interlinkages and interdependencies in a system or market, where the failure of a single entity or cluster of entities can cause a cascading failure, which could potentially bankrupt or bring down the entire system or market. It is also sometimes erroneously referred to as 'systematic risk'. In finance, systemic risk is the risk of collapse of an entire financial system or entire market, as opposed to risk associated with any one individual entity, group or component of a system, that can be contained therein without harming the entire system. It can be defined as 'financial system instability, potentially catastrophic, caused or exacerbated by idiosyncratic events or conditions in financial intermediaries'. It refers to the risks imposed by interlinkages and interdependencies in a system or market, where the failure of a single entity or cluster of entities can cause a cascading failure, which could potentially bankrupt or bring down the entire system or market. It is also sometimes erroneously referred to as 'systematic risk'. Systemic risk has been associated with a bank run which has a cascading effect on other banks which are owed money by the first bank in trouble, causing a cascading failure. As depositors sense the ripple effects of default, and liquidity concerns cascade through money markets, a panic can spread through a market, with a sudden flight to quality, creating many sellers but few buyers for illiquid assets. These interlinkages and the potential 'clustering' of bank runs are the issues which policy makers consider when addressing the issue of protecting a system against systemic risk. Governments and market monitoring institutions (such as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and central banks) often try to put policies and rules in place with the justification of safeguarding the interests of the market as a whole, claiming that the trading participants in financial markets are entangled in a web of dependencies arising from their interlinkage. In simple English, this means that some companies are viewed as too big and too interconnected to fail. Policy makers frequently claim that they are concerned about protecting the resiliency of the system, rather than any one individual in that system. Systemic risk arises because of the interaction of market participants, and therefore can be seen as a form of endogenous risk. See also What is systemic risk? on YouTube. The risk management literature offers an alternative perspective to notions from economics and finance by distinguishing between the nature of systemic failure, its causes and effects, and the risk of its occurrence. It takes an 'operational behaviour' approach to defining systemic risk of failure as: 'A measure of the overall probability at a current time of the system entering an operational state of systemic failure by a specified time in the future, in which the supply of financial services no longer satisfies demand according to regulatory criteria, qualified by a measure of uncertainty about the system’s future behaviour, in the absence of new mitigation efforts.' This definition lends itself to practical risk mitigation applications, as demonstrated in recent research by a simulation of the collapse of the Icelandic financial system in circa 2008.