Falk Bräuning

Monetary Policy and Global Banking

Global banks use their global balance sheets to respond to local monetary policy. However, sources and uses of funds are often denominated in different currencies. This leads to a foreign exchange (FX) exposure that banks need to hedge. If cross�?currency flows are large, the hedging cost increases, diminishing the return on lending in foreign currency. We show that, in response to domestic monetary policy easing, global banks increase their foreign reserves in currency areas with the highest interest rate, while decreasing lending in these markets. We also find an increase in FX hedging activity and its rising cost, as manifested in violations of covered interest rate parity.

Cross-Border Liquidity, Relationships and Monetary Policy: Evidence from the Euro Area Interbank Crisis

We analyze the impact of financial crises and monetary policy on the supply of wholesale funding liquidity, and also on the compositional supply effects through cross-border and relationship lending. For empirical identification, we draw on the proprietary bank-to-bank European interbank dataset extracted from Target2 and also exploit the Lehman and sovereign crisis shocks as well as the main Eurosystem non-standard monetary policy measures. The robust results imply that the crisis shocks lead to worse access, volumes and spreads (in both the overnight and longer-term maturities). The quantitative impact on interbank access and volume is stronger than on spreads. Liquidity supply restrictions are exacerbated for cross-border lending after the Lehman failure; for banks headquartered in periphery countries, the impact is quantitatively stronger in the sovereign debt crisis. Moreover, the interbank market – unlike other credit markets – allows to exploit the price dispersion from different lenders on identical credit contracts, i.e. overnight uncollateralized loans in the same morning for the same borrower. This price dispersion increases massively with the crisis, and even more for riskier borrowers. Cross-border and previous relationship lenders charge higher prices for identical contracts in the crisis. Importantly, this price dispersion substantially decreases when the Eurosystem promises unlimited access to liquidity at a fixed price in October 2008 and announces the 3-year LTRO in December 2011, with economically stronger effects for borrowers in weaker countries.

A Dynamic Stochastic Network Model of the Unsecured Interbank Lending Market

This paper introduces a structural micro-founded dynamic stochastic network model for the unsecured interbank lending market. Banks are profit optimizing agents subject to random liquidity shocks and can engage in costly counterparty search to find suitable trading partners and peer monitoring to reduce counterparty risk uncertainty. The structural parameters are estimated by indirect inference using appropriate network statistics of the Dutch interbank market. The estimated model is shown to explain accurately important dynamic features of the interbank market network. In particular, monitoring of counterparty risk and directed search are shown to be key factors in the formation of interbank trading relationships that are associated with improved credit conditions. Finally, the model is used to filter the optimal search and monitoring expenditures in the network and to analyze optimal network responses to changes in the policy of the central bank.

U. S. monetary policy and emerging market credit cycles

Foreign banks’ lending to firms in emerging market economies (EMEs) is large and denominated predominantly in U.S. dollars. This creates a direct connection between U.S. monetary policy and EME credit cycles. We estimate that over a typical U.S. monetary easing cycle, EME borrowers experience a 32-percentage-point greater increase in the volume of loans issued by foreign banks than do borrowers from developed markets, followed by a fast credit contraction of a similar magnitude upon reversal of the U.S. monetary policy stance. This result is robust across different geographies and industries, and holds for U.S. and non-U.S. lenders, including those with little direct exposure to the U.S. economy. EME local lenders do not offset the foreign bank capital flows, and U.S. monetary policy affects credit conditions for EME firms, both at the extensive and intensive margin. Consistent with a risk-driven credit-supply adjustment, we show that the spillover is stronger for riskier EMEs, and, within countries, for higher-risk firms.