The importance for welfare analysis of treating interbank payments as endogenous is underscored by the most widely known recent payment crisis, related to the failure of the Herstatt Bank in 1974. The closure of that bank by its German regulator caused delayed receipt, and partial loss of about $200 million to U.S. creditors who were supposed to have received dollars from the bank
on that day. 2 Those traders’ resulting illiquidity temporarily disrupted the flow of other payments
over the CHIPS based in New York, through which the payment from Herstatt was supposed to have been made.To the extent that the Herstatt failure had a welfare cost, it was either through (1) the delay of specific transactions that depended on CHIPS payments, or (2) transactors’ subsequent decisions
to avoid CHIPS and make payments instead through a more costly arrangement, or (3) transactors’
subsequent decisions to use CHIPS in a less convenient or cost-effectiveway than before. 3 Neither
of the first two effects seems to have been significant. Regarding effect (1), we are unaware of
any specific claim having been made that the temporary disruption of CHIPS imposed a high
cost on a specific participant or customer of a participant. The disruption did not cause any runlike
problem for the payment system or the banking system as a whole. 4 Regarding effect (2),
the number of CHIPS participants and the value of transactions grew between 1973 and 1974,
and again between 1974 and 1975. 5 However, regarding effect (3), there is some evidence that
CHIPS participants individually and collectively adopted costlier business processes in order to
shield themselves from loss in the event that a counterparty would default.