The dark side of bank wholesale funding

Rocco Huang and Lev Ratnovski ()

No 09-3, Working Papers from Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia

Abstract: Commercial banks increasingly use short-term wholesale funds to supplement traditional retail deposits. Existing literature mainly points to the \"bright side\" of wholesale funding: sophisticated financiers can monitor banks, disciplining bad ones but refinancing solvent ones. This paper models a \"dark side\" of wholesale funding. In an environment with a costless but imperfect signal on bank project quality (e.g., credit ratings, performance of peers), short-term wholesale financiers have lower incentives to conduct costly information acquisition, and instead may withdraw based on negative but noisy public signals, triggering inefficient liquidations. We show that the \"dark side\" of wholesale funding dominates the \"bright side\" when bank assets are more arm's length and tradable (leading to more relevant public signals and lower liquidation costs): precisely the attributes of a banking sector with securitizations and risk transfers. The results shed light on the recent financial turmoil, explaining why some wholesale financiers did not provide market discipline ex-ante and exacerbated liquidity risks ex-post.

Keywords: Wholesale price indexes; Bank liabilities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (46)

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Related works:
Journal Article: The dark side of bank wholesale funding (2011)
Working Paper: The dark side of bank wholesale funding (2010)
Working Paper: The Dark Side of Bank Wholesale Funding (2010)
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