BIS Quarterly Review, March 2019

Shifting prospects for growth and monetary policy in major economies dominated market developments during the period under review. In December, investors' concerns that monetary policy would remain on a firmer course, despite a softening global economy, drove risky asset prices sharply lower. Starting in January, an accommodative turn in policy and improved economic signals in the United States lifted those prices again. ...

This article examines the importance of foreign banks in the provision of credit to emerging market borrowers. It documents this along two dimensions: the share of total credit provided and the concentration of claims from different foreign banking systems. The share of credit from foreign banks in total credit to emerging market economies has fallen since the Great Financial Crisis, but still stands at 15-20% on average, with the remainder provided by domestic banks or non-bank creditors. ...

The transition from a reference rate regime centred on interbank offered rates (IBORs) to one based on a new set of overnight risk-free rates (RFRs) is an important paradigm shift for markets. This special feature provides an overview of RFR benchmarks, and compares some of their key characteristics with those of existing benchmarks. While the new RFRs can serve as robust and credible overnight reference rates rooted in transactions in liquid markets, they do so at the expense of not capturing banks' marginal term funding costs. ...

The BIS is launching a public, online and interactive repository of studies on the effects of financial regulations, called FRAME. The purpose of this repository is to keep track of, organise, standardise and disseminate the latest findings. FRAME currently covers 83 studies and 139 quantitative impact estimates from 15 countries or groups of countries, offering a new and comprehensive perspective on what the literature has been able to document to date, and where gaps exist. ...

We trace the imprint of the ECB's expanded asset purchase programme (APP) on international bond portfolios and euro-denominated deposits. Our analysis suggests that non-bank financial institutions (NBFIs) located outside the euro area sold large volumes of euro area government bonds and kept a substantial fraction of the proceeds as euro-denominated deposits, primarily in UK-resident banks. ...

Short-term market interest rates seem to have been less responsive to economic news in the postcrisis period. We evaluate two potential reasons: forward guidance and the constraint on monetary policy imposed by the zero lower bound (ZLB). We quantify how the ZLB has dampened market reactions to news in the United States, using estimates of the probability of hitting the ZLB derived from overnight index swap rates. ...