This paper examines the linkage between bank liquidity creation and systemic risk. Using quarterly data on U.S. bank holding companies from 2003 to 2016, we document that liquidity creation decreases systemic risk at the individual bank level after controlling for bank size, asset risk, and other bank-specific attributes. After decomposing systemic risk into bank-specific tail risk and systemic linkage, we find that the riskiness of individual banks is negatively linked to liquidity creation. Nevertheless, our results also demonstrate that liquidity creation strengthens the systemic linkage of individual banks to severe shocks in the financial system. Overall, our empirical findings demonstrate that the level of liquidity creation may have important implications for financial stability and the prudential supervision of financial institutions.

We use a novel, household opinion-based measure – Public Confidence in a Bank – to explore the role of bank-level and industry-level determinants of retail customers’ trust in commercial banks. Our study tracks bank-month confidence measures during the 1/1/2010–1/1/2019 period in an unbalanced sample of 181 closely monitored large Russian banks that collectively account for the supermajority of the country’s banking assets. We find that contrary to common expectations, public confidence in a bank is heavily driven by the industry-level financial stability indicators, while bank-level risk measures play only a minimal – or, at best, supplementary – role. This result reveals the important role of overall banking sector stability in determining public perception of the safety and soundness of individual banks and justifies the leading role of industry-level stability in ensuring trust in banks.