Central bank currency swap lines

As the US dollar plays a pivotal role in international trade and financial markets, non-US banks’ reliance on short-term wholesale funding markets (such as repo, commercial paper, certificate of deposit and swap markets) to finance their dollar assets makes them especially vulnerable to shocks in these markets, such as those arising from the global financial and COVID-19 crises. The crisis management mechanisms in place before the global financial crisis (the International Monetary Fund and international reserves) were overwhelmed by it. Only the rapid deployment of an international currency swap network, as a result of policy cooperation between the main global central banks, allowed equilibrium between dollar supply and demand to be restored and the severest consequences of the market strains for non-US banks to be avoided.