Follow That Money! How Global Banks Manage Liquidity Globally

Banks increasingly move money around the world. Over the last thirty years, gross international claims of banks from all countries have grown ten-fold, reaching a peak of about $25 trillion in 2007 (see chart below). Such global banking flows have been much in the news recently, sometimes depicted as a key culprit of the transmission around the globe of the shocks following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, and more recently the European sovereign debt crisis. The discourse in the regulatory arena seems to share this sentiment, with a bias towards curbing some of the global banking activity (for example, Bank for International Settlements, CGFS 2010, and the United Kingdom Independent Commission on Banking 2011). We acknowledge that global banking has contributed to the international propagation of shocks during the 2007 to 2009 crisis, as shown in a range of recent studies (for example, Acharya and Schnabl 2010, Cetorelli and Goldberg 2011, and 2012). However, we argue that there still are many unknowns regarding the intensity and the direction of global banking flows, as well as the consequences of these flows. There is a pressing need to refine our understanding of these dynamics, not just from a positive angle, but also to inform policy analysis. We take steps in this direction in some of our research, discussed in this blog post. We show that global banks manage liquidity on a global scale and that internal funding reallocations are bank and business-model specific. This centralized liquidity management is a feature of normal times, as well as a feature of market stress periods.