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

The paper investigates the impact of solvency and liquidity regulation as well as market shocks on banks’ balance sheet structure. It contributes in particular to the debate on the use of liquidity buffers by banks, as initiated by Goodhart’s (2008), “last taxi” argument. The volatility of long-term markets observed during the Covid-19 pandemic shows that periods of sharp increase in risk aversion still result in liquidity strains for banks. The latter react differently depending on the diversity of their funding sources and their risk profile. Indeed, during a crisis, due to interactions between funding and market liquidity, as well as regulatory constraints, one may wonder whether banks may increase or decrease liquidity. According to a simple portfolio allocation model banks’ liquidity increases when the regulatory constraint is binding, as banks hoard extra liquidity, while they do not if the regulatory constraint is not binding. We show that in times of crisis, measured by large deviations of a financial variable capturing international markets’ risk aversion, French banks actually decreased the liquidity coefficient, with our results mostly driven by less liquid banks. However, while we do find that the solvency ratio has a weakly significant effect on the liquidity coefficient, we were not able to establish a firm causal relationship between the two variables on the basis of Granger causality tests

We analyze the role of loan maturity and collateral eligibility in the transmission of central bank liquidity provisions to banks following a wholesale funding dry-up. We analyze the transmission of the three-year LTRO, which substantially extended the ECB liquidity maturity, in Italy, where banks benefited from a government guarantee program that effectively relaxed the ECB collateral requirements. Combining the national credit register with banks securities holdings, we find that (i) the maturity extension supported banks’ credit supply and (ii) banks used most liquidity to buy domestic government bonds and substitute missing wholesale funding, two possibly unstated goals of the intervention

Raising capital on wholesale debt markets is an important source of funding for banks and non-banking institutions throughout the world. We investigate the determinants of wholesale funding costs for the Global Systematically Important Banks (G-SIBs) using credit default swaps, the proxy for the cost of wholesale debt funding. Using 25 G-SIBs which are heavily reliant on debt capital markets across multiple currencies, this paper investigates whether the default risk of the interbank lending system, i.e., LIBOR-OIS spread is a new global macroeconomic factor in determining G-SIBs’ CDS spreads. Based on time-fixed effects and bank-fixed effects, we find default risk from the US banking system seems to play a greater role in explaining the wholesale funding costs of the G-SIBs than that of their home-country equivalent default risk. Overall, the findings make an important contribution to domestic and international debt funding markets and provide an insight for financial intermediaries, regulators, and monetary-policy makers

We formulate the “High Liquidity Creation Hypothesis” (HLCH) that a proliferation in the core activity of bank liquidity creation increases failure probability. We test the HLCH in the context of Russian banking, where many failures occurred albeit not triggered by swings in business cycles or an exogenous shock such as a crisis. Using Berger and Bouwman (2009) liquidity creation measures, we find that high liquidity creation is associated with greater probability of bank failure and this finding survives multiple robustness checks. Our results suggest that regulatory authorities can mitigate systemic distress and reduce the costs to society from bank failures through early identification of high liquidity creators

Using U.S. bank data from 1996 to 2013, this paper studies how liquidity risk affects bank performance in financial crises. It finds that during the subprime crisis of 2007–09, liquidity risk reduced a bank’s survival probability, ROA, and net interest margin, and increased its loan-loss-provision expenses. This adverse effect was more severe for banks with lower capital ratios and higher credit risk. In contrast, there is no strong evidence that liquidity risk hurts bank performance in market crises. The results in this paper imply that liquidity risk is not merely a symptom of banks’ insolvency problems; it has an independent effect on bank performance in banking crises

We examine the impact of bank liquidity creation on systemic risk and its heterogeneous impact over the network connectedness. We find that excessive liquidity creation increases the systemic risk with a “U shape” relationship, while internal and external liquidity creation drives systemic risk in a different way. Network connectedness of banks strengthens the relationship between liquidity creation and systemic risk. Our results provide supporting evidence on regulating bank liquidity creation to enhance the financial stability

This paper studies the effects of the oil price shocks on local banks, and the propagation of the shocks through banks’ branching networks. Exposed banks with significant operations in oil-concentrated counties experienced a decline in demand deposit, a surge in credit line drawdowns, and a jump in troubled loans. Facing liquidity pressure, banks were forced to sell liquid assets, offer higher deposit rates, and reduce lending to small businesses and mortgage borrowers in unaffected markets. The effect is magnified when banks do not have strong community ties, while it is mitigated if banks have higher liquidity buffers, or sufficiently dispersed branching networks. I further document that healthy unexposed banks’ capacity to substitute credit supply is quite limited, providing fresh evidence from the perspective of bank competition

Postcrisis regulations apply stricter liquidity rules to both money market funds (MMFs) and banks, requiring MMFs to do more overnight lending and banks to borrow longer-term. MMFs and banks resolve this dilemma by developing a “bundling” strategy across overnight and longer term markets. In particular, MMFs increase longer term funding and charge a lower rate to banks that have recently accommodated MMFs’ overnight depositing needs. Such cross-market reciprocity is stronger between MMFs and foreign banks, which depend on MMFs for dollar funding more than U.S. banks do. MMFs with lower liquidity buffers and higher flow volatility are more likely to engage in bundling

We study the interaction between solvency and funding costs at UK banks. We use the market-based leverage ratio as a proxy for market participants’ perceptions of bank solvency. We investigate the impact that changes in this ratio have on banks’ CDS premia, which are a proxy for their marginal cost of wholesale funding. We find that a negative shock to market participants’ perception of banks’ solvency is associated with an increase in banks’ marginal cost of wholesale funding. We find evidence that this negative relationship is nonlinear, i.e. the responsiveness of funding costs to a shock to solvency is greater at lower initial levels of solvency