We explore whether central bank intervention improves liquidity in the interbank market during the current sub-prime crisis with unique trade and quote data from the e-MID, the only regulated electronic interbank market in the world. Central bank intervention consistently creates greater uncertainty in the interbank market. Prior to the crisis, the cover-to-bid ratio effectively conveys good and bad news from the central bank, but this link is broken during the crisis, suggesting that standard (and special) interventions that do not specifically target interbank asymmetric information fail to improve market liquidity. Our results suggest that the central bank should focus on providing interbank loan guarantees or engage in direct asset purchases rather than simply injecting capital into the system when counterparty risk poses systemic risk to the interbank market.
We empirically investigate why wholesale funding is fragile by providing the first study of how individual banks borrow and lend in the euro unsecured and secured interbank market. Consistent with theories in which lenders enforce market discipline by monitoring counterparty credit risk and theories highlighting that secured loans are less informational sensitive, we find that banks with low credit worthiness replace unsecured borrowing with secured loans. Moreover, riskier lenders provide more secured loans to replace unsecured lending, which is not consistent with speculative or precautionary liquidity hoarding theories. Instead, lenders are precautionary in the sense that they prefer to lend against safe collateral.
We study how individual banks borrow and lend in the euro unsecured and secured interbank market. We find that banks with lower credit worthiness replace unsecured with secured borrowing, which is consistent with a reduction in the supply of unsecured loans rather than a lower demand for funding. Riskier lenders replace unsecured with secured lending, suggesting that banks take precautionary measures and prefer to lend against safe collateral. Our results highlight the importance of a joint analysis of unsecured and secured funding. Separate analyses only give a partial view and might yield misleading conclusions when banks access both funding sources.
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