We study the conflict of interest that arises when a universal bank conducts proprietary trading alongside its retail banking services. Our data set contains the stock holdings of every German bank and those of their corresponding retail clients. We investigate (i) whether banks sell stocks from their proprietary portfolios to their retail customers, (ii) whether those stocks subsequently underperform, and (iii) whether retail customers of banks engaging in proprietary trading earn lower portfolio returns than their peers. We present affirmative evidence for all three questions and conclude that proprietary trading can, in fact, be detrimental to retail investors.

In this paper, we focus on the interconnectedness of banks and the price they pay for liquidity. We assess how the concentration of credit relationships and the position of a bank in the network topology of the system influence the bank’s ability to meet liquidity demand. We use quarterly data of bilateral interbank credit exposure among all German banks from 2000 to 2008 to measure interbank relationships and network characteristics. We match these data with bids placed by individual banks in the European Central Bank’s (ECB) weekly repo auctions. The bids measure each bank’s willingness to pay for liquidity, since they had variable rate tenders with a “pay-your-bid” price. Controlling for bank characteristics and the daily fulfillment of reserve requirements, we find that banks with a more diversified borrowing structure in the interbank market bid significantly less aggressively and pay a lower price for liquidity in the ECB’s main refinancing operations. These findings suggest that incentives to diversify banks’ liquidity risk dominate the benefits of private information. When the network position of the bank is taken into account, we find that central lenders in the money market bid more aggressively in auctions.

Recent regulatory initiatives such as the European Deposit Insurance Scheme propose a change in the coverage and backing of deposit insurances. An assessment of these proposals requires a thorough understanding of what drives depositors’ withdrawal decisions. We show that Google searches for ‘deposit insurance’ and related strings reflect depositors’ fears and help to predict deposit shifts in the German banking sector from private banks to fully guaranteed public banks. After the introduction of blanket state guarantees for all deposits in the German banking system this fear-driven reallocation of deposits stopped. Our findings highlight that a heterogeneous insurance of deposits can lead to a sudden, fear-induced reallocation of deposits endangering the stability of the banking sector even in absence of redenomination risks.