The VIII International Workshop “Systemic Risks in the Financial Sector” Held at the Faculty of Economic Sciences
The VIII International Workshop “Systemic Risks in the Financial Sector” was organized by the School of Finance and the Research and Educational Laboratory for Financial Innovation and Risk Management of the Faculty of Economic Sciences. The event was opened by Sergey Pekarski, Dean of the Faculty of Economic Sciences at HSE University, who emphasized the importance of “maintaining an academic environment where complex issues of financial stability can be discussed openly, rigorously, and professionally.”
The program included three academic sessions. The first covered shareholder interconnectedness and banking stability (Matteo Foglia), the impact of managerial style on bank transparency in Vietnam (Tran Viet Dung and Nhat Minh Nguyen), the effects of sanctions-related uncertainty on financial stress in Russia (Maria Shchepeleva and Mikhail Stolbov), and the relationship between natural disasters and deposit dynamics (Dimitris Anastasiou).
The second session examined lending standards and their effects on corporate credit in Kazakhstan (Zhandos Ybrayev), time-frequency connectedness between the NFT market and major currencies during periods of crisis (Hassan Zada), the potential architecture of a closed-loop international settlement system for emerging markets (Andrey Leonidov, Alexei Ponomarenko, Stanislav Radionov, and E. Vasilyeva), as well as the causes and consequences of the collapse of the algorithmic stablecoin TerraClassic (Kirill Anikeev, Vadim Grishchenko, and Artem Tyatenko).
The third session addressed macroprudential policy in G20 countries (Shivani Narayan), the prospects for financial risk sharing within BRICS (Anastasia Podrugina), agent-based models of inflation and technological progress (Henry Penikas), the systemic vulnerability of multi-agent LLM-based financial systems (Andrey Vlasov), and the use of AI to manage balance-sheet risks in Russian banks (Ekaterina Seryakova).
A special highlight was the keynote lecture by Kazi Sohag , Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Management of St. Petersburg State University and Head of the Laboratory for Economic Policy and Natural Resources at Ural Federal University. Moderator Mikhail Stolbov emphasized his international recognition: according to Research Papers in Economics, Professor Sohag is among the top 1,000 economists worldwide and is the most cited economist in Russia over the past ten years. His research interests span a wide range of topics, but in recent years he has been actively publishing on geoeconomic fragmentation — the focus of his talk.
Professor Sohag presented a multi-layered analysis of how the world is transitioning from a unipolar financial architecture to a system with several economic poles of influence. He began by examining theoretical scenarios of the shift from unipolarity to multipolarity, highlighting the rising “costs of hegemony”: the growth of U.S. public debt, structural trade deficits, the burden of financing global influence infrastructure, and increasing inequality caused by the concentration of innovation and capital in narrow sectors.
In the second part, Sohag presented IMF data illustrating the rise of geoeconomic fragmentation — particularly political and trade fragmentation. At the same time, as his research shows, global trade is not shrinking but is instead being reallocated within economic blocs such as BRICS, ASEAN, and the G7. To demonstrate this, he presented modeling results based on time-varying local projections, which show an acceleration of intra-bloc trade following geopolitical shocks.
The third part of the lecture focused on the transformation of the international monetary system. Sohag noted that the share of the U.S. dollar in global reserves is declining, while China is steadily developing mechanisms for the use of the digital yuan in international settlements. He proposed a possible model of a “tokenized” system of mutual payments within BRICS, using gold and a distributed ledger managed by the New Development Bank.
In conclusion, the speaker turned to the Russian context. He showed that the financial stress experienced in Russia after 2022 was short-lived and quickly mitigated thanks to the absence of financial bubbles, the preparedness of the banking sector, macroprudential measures, and the emergence of yuan-denominated corporate bonds as a protective instrument. He also noted the decreasing role of oil and gas revenues in the federal budget and the resilience of the corporate sector, based on an analysis of more than two million firm-level observations.
A member of the workshop’s organizing committee, Professor Alexander Karminsky, thanked the participants and attendees and proposed publishing a collection of materials based on the results of the event, which would include key presentations and the speakers’ research.