金融危机的信息观

THE INFORMATION VIEW OF FINANCIAL CRISES

作者：

特里维当（Tri Vi Dang）

加里·戈登（Gary B. Gorton）

本特·R·霍尔姆斯特罗姆（Bengt R. Holmstrom）

Short-term debt that can serve as a medium of exchange is designed to be information insensitive.No one should be tempted to acquire private information to gain an informational advantage intrading that could destabilize the value of the debt. Short-term debt minimizes the incentive toacquire information among all securities of equal value backed by the same underlying asset.These features align with observed practice in money markets (markets for short-term debt). Theyare also consistent with financial crises occurring periodically. In the information view adoptedhere, financial crisis can occur when the collateral backing the short-term debt is thought to havelost enough value to raise doubts among the traders that some may acquire private information.The purpose of this paper is to review some of the burgeoning empirical literature that bears onthe information view sketched above. We focus on evidence related to three key implications ofinformation insensitive debt: (i) adjustments to external shocks will occur along non-pricedimensions (less debt issued, higher haircuts, added collateral, etc);(ii) in a crisis some of theshort-term debt turns information sensitive; (iii) money markets feature low transparency as wellas purposeful opacity.
可以用作交换媒介的短期债务旨在对信息不敏感。任何人都不应试图获取私人信息，以获得在交易中可能破坏债务价值的信息优势。短期债务最大程度地减少了在由相同基础资产支持的所有等值证券中获取信息的动机。这些特征与货币市场（短期债务市场）中观察到的实践一致。它们也与周期性发生的金融危机一致。在这里采用的信息视图中，当认为支持短期债务的抵押品损失了足够的价值，从而引起交易者之间怀疑某些交易者可能获取私人信息时，就会发生金融危机。本文的目的是回顾一些基于上面概述的信息视图的新兴经验文献。我们将重点放在与信息不敏感债务的三个关键含义相关的证据上：（i）外部冲击的调整将沿着非价格维度进行（债务发行量减少，削减额度增加，抵押品增加等）；（ii）在危机中，一些短期债务使信息变得敏感；（iii）货币市场具有透明度低和故意不透明的特点。