Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

November 2012 (Revised July 2013)

Liquidity Shocks, Dollar Funding Costs, and the Bank Lending Channel During the European Sovereign Crisis

Ricardo Correa, Horacio Sapriza, and Andrei Zlate

Abstract:

This paper documents a new type of cross-border bank lending channel. The deepening of the European sovereign debt crisis in 2011 restrained the financial intermediation of European banks in the United States. In this period, some of the U.S. branches of European banks faced a dollar liquidity shock—due to their perceived risk reflecting the sovereign risk of their countries of origin—which in turn affected the branches’ lending to U.S. entities. We use a novel dataset to analyze the operations of branches of foreign banks in the United States. Our results show that: (1) The U.S. branches of European banks experienced a run on their deposits, mainly from U.S. money market funds. (2) The branches with curtailed access to large time deposits relied more on funding from their own parent institutions, thus shifting from being net suppliers to being net receivers of dollar funding from their related offices. (3) Since the additional funding received from parent institutions was not enough to offset the decreased access to U.S. funding, such branches reduced their lending to U.S. entities.

Keywords: Sovereign risk, international banking, money market funds, liquidity management

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