Bank liquidity buffers strengthen but resilience varies widely

The freely available toolkit applies three nested stress scenarios, broadly calibrated to the Basel III Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR), to public balance sheet data.

Its coverage spans nearly 13,000 commercial banks across more than 100 economies since 2006, including the Great Financial Crisis.

The central metric, the break-even stress factor, measures the minimum shock intensity at which a bank's net liquidity becomes negative.

It expresses how much more severe than the baseline a shock must become before liquidity runs out.

Interactive modules offer pre-calibrated benchmarks, pre-run simulations and user-defined scenarios.

Users can compare individual banks and banking systems across countries and over time.

Liquidity buffers have generally strengthened since Basel III's introduction; even the weakest 10 percent of banks globally would now withstand an adverse liquidity scenario.

Resilience nevertheless varies widely across banks and countries, with banking systems retaining persistent rankings over time.

Public LCR disclosures mostly cover large banks, extend back only to the mid-2010s and provide a single regulatory ratio.

Supervisory tests typically use confidential data and are rarely published.

The 2023 bank failures in the United States and Europe showed how quickly liquidity crises unfold.