Ralph Chami
Ralph Chami is currently Division Chief in the Middle East and Central Asia Department, The International Monetary Fund. Prior to that, he was the Chief of the Middle Eastern Division of the IMF Institute. He joined the IMF in 1999. From 1991–1999, he was on the faculty of Finance in the Department of Finance, University of Notre Dame in Indiana. He also served as a consultant to the World Bank, and to the private sector in the US. He has a BS from the American University of Beirut, an MBA in Finance and Statistics from the University of Kansas, and a PhD in Economics from the Johns Hopkins University. His areas of specialisation are banking risk management, regulation and supervision, financial markets, and remittances. His hobbies include music and yoga. Ralph was a semiprofessional guitarist for over 30 years.
Papers Published in World Economics:
Further Fallout from the Global Financial Crisis
We examine the recent credit slowdown in emerging markets from three analytical angles. First, we find that, similar to past history, a credit boom preceded the current slowdown in many emerging markets, and argue that, going forward, a protracted period of sluggish growth is likely. Second, we focus on a relatively understudied region – the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) – using a more detailed banking data. We uncover a key role played by bank funding, in particular, deposit growth and external borrowing slowed considerably, despite expansionary monetary policy. Finally, we show that bank-level fundamentals – capitalisation and loan quality – helped to explain differences in credit growth across banks and countries.
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