Bräuning, Falk and Ivashina, Victoria, Monetary Policy and Global Banking (June 21, 2016). Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2801304

“Multinational banks use their global internal capital market to respond to local shocks. However, what distinguishes global banks is not only their geographical diversification, but also their funding model: the primary source of stable funding for banks is denominated in their domestic currency. When global banks use their global balance sheets to smooth out local shocks, they need to hedge their foreign exchange exposure. In times when there is limited capital to take the other side of the hedging transaction, this will attenuate the use of internal markets to smooth out local shocks. In this context, tightening monetary policy in the lender’s home country can actually reduce pressure on the swap market, making lending abroad more attractive. Using the changes in interest paid on excess reserves by monetary authorities in six major currency areas between 2000 and 2015, we show that multinational banks reduce their reserve holdings and increase their lending abroad in response to a tightening of domestic monetary policy. This result is robust to the inclusion of a narrow set of fixed effects, and holds at the loan level. Consistent with the proposed mechanism, we show that global banks’ cross-border movement of capital is associated with an increase in foreign exchange swapping activity and its rising cost, as manifested in violations of covered interest rate parity.”