How good is the market at assessing bank fragility? A horse race between different indicators

We explore for individual banks, active in the East Asian countries during the years 1996 1998, the performance of three sets of indicators of bank fragility that can be computed from publicly available information: accounting data, stock market prices, and credit ratings. We find significantly different patterns among the three groups of indicators in their ability of forecasting financial distress at a specific point in time and over time. More specifically, in the East Asia crisis episode the information based on stock prices or on judgmental assessments of credit rating agencies did not outpace backward looking information contained in balance sheet data. Stock market based information, though, has responded more quickly to changing financial conditions than ratings of credit risk agencies. Overall, the evidence supports the policy conclusion that, where the information processing is quite costly, as in most developing countries, it is important to use simultaneously a plurality of indicators to assess bank fragility. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.