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.This publication is available on the BIS website (www.bis.org).
Asset encumbrance refers to the existence of bank balance sheet assets being subject to arrangements that restrict the bank’s ability to freely transfer or realize them. Asset encumbrance has recently become a much discussed subject and policymakers have been actively addressing what some consider to be excessive levels of asset encumbrance. Despite its importance, the phenomenon of asset encumbrance remains poorly understood. We build a novel data set of asset encumbrance metrics based on information provided in the banks’ public disclosures for the very first time throughout 2015. We provide descriptive evidence of asset encumbrance levels by country, credit quality, size, and business model, using different encumbrance metrics. Our empirical results point to the existence of an association between CDS premia and asset encumbrance that is negative, not positive. That is, on average, encumbrance is perceived to be beneficial. Still, certain bank-level variables play a mediating role in this relationship. For banks that have high exposures to the central bank, high leverage ratios, and/or are located in southern Europe, asset encumbrance is less beneficial and could even be detrimental in absolute terms.
This article documents the difference in corporate bond issuance between the euro area (EA) and the United States (US) in 2020, especially in the high-yield (HY) segment, and discusses the role that the monetary policy measures undertaken by the US Federal Reserve (Fed) and the ECB in response to the Covid-19 crisis may have played in explaining such difference. We document that the issuance of HY bonds since February 2020 has been lower by historical standards in the EA than in the US. The Fed's measures aimed at the HY segment, mainly the purchase of HY bond exchange traded funds (ETFs), could have reduced credit spreads and improved market liquidity, which in turn could have stimulated debt issuance. Alternatively, HY issuers in the EA may have faced better bank funding conditions due to the ECB's targeted longer term refinancing operations (TLTRO) and to other measures by national fiscal authorities, leading such issuers to substitute bank credit for bond finance. The article discusses these possibilities and argues that they all may have played a role to a certain extent.
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