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Refereed Articles

Lending of First versus Lending of Last Resort. Lessons from the Bulgarian Financial Crisis 19967/1997

Michael Berlemann, Nikolay Nenovsky (2004),
Comparative Economic Studies 46(2), 245-271.

In 1996/1997 Bulgaria was hit by a severe financial crisis, spreading from a banking crisis to a currency crisis. We argue that the Bulgarian Financial Crisis might serve as an illustrative example of a twin crisis involving both a currency and a banking crisis. While the Bulgarian Crisis had some properties of the so-called fundamental crises, as explained by first-generation models of currency crises, the severity of the crisis was primarily (but not only) due to systematic and path-dependent moral hazard behaviour of the banking sector. Special attention is paid to the crucial role the Bulgarian National Bank played in the pre-crisis and crisis periods when acting more as a lender of first resort rather than a lender of last resort (LOLR). We also show how Bulgaria managed to overcome the crisis by introducing a second-generation currency board allowing the central bank to act strictly as a limited LOLR, thereby making the country less prone to a financial crisis in the future.

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Nikolay Nenovsky