Financial Integration and the Great Leveraging

This paper studies how international capital flows affect domestic credit and money holdings. While previous studies have focused on credit growth and highlighted the importance of the equity/debt mix of flows, this paper shows that there are also important implications of flows going to different domestic recipient sectors, especially concerning money dynamics. In particular, cross-border banking flows display a strong comovement with credit but none with broad money; in turn, flows of domestic non-banks display comovement with both credit and money. For this reason, banking flows correlate with the decoupling of these two variables – the Great Leveraging –, a stylised fact documented for several economies in the past decades and associated to the rapid expansion of banks non-monetary liabilities. These results thus shed light on the mechanisms through which the international banking activity might have consequences for the composition of the domestic bank balance sheet.