BIS Review 23/2010  5  improved access to credit. But, in designing a facility, the Bank was concerned not to encourage the sort of risk-taking which had caused so many problems leading up to the crisis. In particular that meant a restriction on the degree of maturity mismatch between the underlying assets and the securities they backed. A purchase scheme was launched last July, but the Bank has not been offered any SCP to buy so far. New programmes take 3–6 months to set up and meanwhile, according to our contacts, the market for such paper, particularly in the United States, quickly improved to the point where our “backstop bid” was no longer attractive. And we are told there has been sufficient capacity within commercial banks’ existing programmes to fund the assets they were generating. Nevertheless, the facility remains open and the Bank is still in discussions with potential issuers. Supply chain finance (SCF) is another route by which smaller firms can potentially get access to credit against high-quality assets. Typically, this would arise when a large firm has a number of suppliers who wish to raise immediate finance against their invoices. Unfortunately there was no SCF market standard and so there was not a viable market that the APF could attempt to catalyse. Last Autumn, a working group of market participants (borrowers, lenders, banks etc) gathered together to develop some proposed standards and try to build a sustainable market in this space.
BIS central bankers’ speeches  5  6  BIS central bankers’ speeches  BIS central bankers’ speeches  7  8  BIS central bankers’ speeches  BIS central bankers’ speeches  9  10  BIS central bankers’ speeches  BIS central bankers’ speeches  11  12  BIS central bankers’ speeches  BIS central bankers’ speeches  13  14  BIS central bankers’ speeches  BIS central bankers’ speeches  15  16  BIS central bankers’ speeches