BIS Working Papers are written by members of the Monetary and Economic Department of the Bank for International Settlements, and from time to time by other economists, and are published by the Bank. The papers are on subjects of topical interest and are technical in character. The views expressed in them are those of their authors and not necessarily the views of the BIS.
Global liquidity is a catch-all term that is used to denote the combination of easier financing conditions, capital inflows, and exchange rate appreciation. An approach based on the activities of internationally active financial institutions sheds light on the conceptual underpinnings and the economic mechanisms involved in the transmission of global liquidity. The analysis highlights the role of international funding currencies, especially the US dollar. The analysis also motivates a set of global liquidity indicators based on the size and currency composition of balance sheets.
It is sometimes suggested that trading in derivatives leads to excessive volatility in underlying asset prices relative to what would be called for by fundamental values. These effects are tested by comparing the variances of price changes over different time horizons before and after the start of organized derivatives trading. It is found that ratios of the variances of multi-day and daily price movements decline for bond prices in the United States and Germany and for stock indices in the US, Japan and the UK, though no such effect is found for Japanese bonds. Other indicators confirm that serial correlation has tended to decline since the introduction of derivatives. While these results offer strong grounds for rejecting predictions of the destabilizing effects of derivatives, an alternative view, that derivatives accelerate the price-discovery functions of cash markets, cannot be definitively confirmed, given ambiguous breakpoint results and the many other contemporaneous developments in financial technology.
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