The World Financial Crisis has shaken the fundamentals of international banking

and triggered a downward spiral of asset prices. To prevent a further meltdown of

markets, governments have intervened massively through rescues measures aimed at recapitalizing banks and through liquidity support. We use a detailed, banklevel dataset for German banks to analyze how the lending and borrowing of their foreign affiliates has responded to domestic (German) and to US crisis support schemes. We analyze how these policy interventions have spilled over into

foreign markets. We identify loan supply shocks by exploiting that not all banks

have received policy support and that the timing of receiving support measures

has differed across banks. We find that banks covered by rescue measures of the

German government have increased their foreign activities after these policy

interventions, but they have not expanded relative to banks not receiving support.

Banks claiming liquidity support under the Term Auction Facility (TAF) program

have withdrawn from foreign markets outside the US, but they have expanded

relative to affiliates of other German banks.

Governments often justify interventions into the financial system in the form of bail outs or liquidity assistance with the systemic importance of large banks for the real economy. In this paper, we analyze whether idiosyncratic shocks to loan growth at large banks have effects on real GDP growth. We employ a measure of idiosyncratic shocks which follows Gabaix (forthcoming). He shows that idiosyncratic shocks to large firms have an impact on US GDP growth. In an application to the banking sector, we find evidence that changes in lending by large banks have a significant short-run impact on GDP growth. Episodes of negative loan growth rates and the Eastern European countries in our sample drive these results.

This paper studies the role of securitization in bank management. I propose a new index of “bank loan portfolio liquidity” which can be thought of as a weighted average of the potential to securitize loans of a given type, where the weights reflect the composition of a bank loan portfolio. I use this new index to show that by allowing banks to convert illiquid loans into liquid funds, securitization reduces banks' holdings of liquid securities and increases their lending ability. Furthermore, securitization provides banks with an additional source of funding and makes bank lending less sensitive to cost of funds shocks. By extension, the securitization weakens the ability of the monetary authority to affect banks' lending activity but makes banks more susceptible to liquidity and funding crisis when the securitization market is shut down.

Government interventions into the financial system in the form of bail out operations or liquidity assistance are often justified with the systemic importance of

large banks for the real economy. In this paper, we test whether idiosyncratic

shocks to loan growth at large banks have effects on real GDP growth. We employ

a measure of idiosyncratic shocks which follows Gabaix (2009). He shows that

idiosyncratic shocks at large firms have an impact on GDP growth in the US. We

apply this idea to the banking sector. We find evidence that changes in lending

by large banks have a significant impact on GDP growth. This effect is mostly

driven by episodes of negative loan growth rates and by the Eastern European

countries in our sample.

Diese Studie untersucht den komparativen Vorteil multinationaler Banken gegenüber dem grenzüberschreitenden Handel mit Finanzdienstleistungen hinsichtlich der Fähigkeit, vom globalen Zugang zu Finanzierungsquellen zu profitieren. Es wird argumentiert, dass der komparative Vorteil durch Nutzen und Kosten einer besonderen Kenntnis lokaler Märkte bestimmt wird. Für multinationale Banken liegt der Nutzen darin, eine höhere Produktivität zu erreichen und mehr Liquidität bereit zu stellen. Die Kosten bestehen darin, dass bestehdne Interessenskonflikte nur aufgrund der Spezifität des Wissens auch zu Ineffizienzen auf den bankinternen Kapitalmärkten führen; diese sind aber erforderlich, um Liquidität grenzüberschreitend zu alloziieren. Es werden die Bedingungen analysiert, unter denen multinationale Banken einen komparativen Vorteil haben, und es wird gezeigt, dass Mindesteigenkapitalvorschriften einen Einfluss hierauf ausüben, da sie das Ausmaß der Ineffizienzen interner Kapitalmärkte für verschiedene Organisationsformen unterschiedlich beeinflussen.

Low‐cost deposits and increased balance sheet liquidity raise banks' supply of illiquid loans more than loans easily sold or securitized. We exploit the inability of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase jumbo mortgages to identify an exogenous change in liquidity. The volume of jumbo mortgage originations relative to nonjumbo originations increases with bank holdings of liquid assets and decreases with bank deposit costs. This result suggests that the increasing depth of the mortgage secondary market fostered by securitization has reduced the effect of lender's financial condition on credit supply.

This study identifies five distinctive stages of the current global financial crisis: the meltdown of the subprime mortgage market; spillovers into broader credit market; the liquidity crisis epitomized by the fallout of Northern Rock, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers with counterparty risk effects on other financial institutions; the commodity price bubble, and the ultimate demise of investment banking in the U.S. The study argues that the severity of the crisis is influenced strongly by changeable allocations of global savings coupled with excessive credit creation, which lead to over-pricing of varied types of assets. The study calls such process a “wandering asset-price bubble“. Unstable allocations elevate market, credit, and liquidity risks. Monetary policy responses aimed at stabilizing financial markets are proposed.

This paper studies how capital requirements influence a bank’s mode of entry into foreign financial markets. We develop a model of an internationally operating bank that creates and allocates liquidity across countries and argue that the advantage of multinational banking over offering cross-border financial services depends on the benefit and the cost of intimacy with local markets. The benefit is that it allows to create more liquidity. The cost is that it causes inefficiencies in internal capital markets, on which a multinational bank relies to allocate liquidity across countries. Capital requirements affect this trade-off by influencing the degree of inefficiency in internal capital markets.

The interbank money market plays a key role in the execution of monetary policy. Hence, it is important to know the functioning of this market and the determinants of the interbank money market rate. In this paper, we develop an interbank money market model with a heterogeneous banking sector. We show that besides for balancing daily liquidity fluctuations banks participate in the interbank market because they have different marginal costs of obtaining funds from the central bank. In the euro area, which we refer to, these cost differences occur because banks have different marginal cost of collateral which they need to hold to obtain funds from the central bank. Banks with relatively low marginal costs act as intermediaries between the central bank and banks with relatively high marginal costs. The necessary positive spread between the interbank market rate and the central bank rate is determined by transaction costs and credit risk in the interbank market, total liquidity needs of the banking sector, costs of obtaining funds from the central bank, and the distribution of the latter across banks.

This Basel Committee working paper is a study of the markets for banks' securities in ten countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States). It aims at contributing to the assessment of the potential effectiveness of direct and indirect market discipline. This is achieved through collecting a rich set of data on the detailed characteristics of the instruments used by banks to tap capital markets, the frequency and size of their issuance activity, and the share of issuing banks in national banking systems. Further, information is collected on the amounts of debt and equity outstanding and about trading volumes and liquidity. Developments over the period from 1990-2001 are evaluated.

The paper focuses on subordinated bonds among banks' debt instruments, because they are the prime class of uninsured instruments suited to generate market discipline and have been proposed by some observers as a mandatory requirement for banks.