The failure of covered interest parity: FX hedging demand and costly balance sheets

Vladyslav Sushko, Claudio Borio, Robert McCauley and Patrick McGuire

No 590, BIS Working Papers from Bank for International Settlements

Abstract: The failure of covered interest parity (CIP), or, equivalently, the persistence of the cross currency basis, in tranquil markets has presented a puzzle. Focusing on the basis against the US dollar (USD), we show that the CIP deviations that are not due to transaction costs or bank credit risk can be explained by the demand to hedge USD forward. Fluctuations in FX hedging demand matter because committing the balance sheet to arbitrage is costly. With limits to arbitrage, CIP arbitrageurs charge a premium in the forward markets for taking the other side of FX hedgers' demand. We find that measures of FX hedging demand, combined with proxies for the risks associated with CIP arbitrage, improve the explanatory power of standard regressions.

Keywords: Covered interest parity; FX swaps; currency basis; limits to arbitrage; US dollar funding; currency hedging (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 64 pages
Date: 2016-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (67)

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