Unconventional Monetary Policy Shocks In The Euro Area And The Sovereign Bank Nexus

We explore the effects of the ECB's unconventional monetary policy on the banks' sovereign debt portfolios. In particular, using panel vector autoregressive (VAR) models we analyze whether banks increased their domestic government bond holdings in response to non-standard monetary policy shocks, thereby possibly promoting the sovereign-bank nexus, i.e. the exposure of banks to the debt issued by the national government. Our results suggest that euro area crisis countries' banks enlarged their exposure to domestic sovereign debt after innovations related to unconventional monetary policy. Moreover, the restructuring of sovereign debt portfolios was characterized by a home bias.

This paper reviews empirical and theoretical work on the links between banks and their governments (the bank-sovereign nexus). How significant is this nexus? What do we know about it? To what extent is it a source of concern? What is the role of policy intervention? The paper concludes with a review of recent policy proposals.

We investigate the time varying dynamics of the linkages between sovereign and bank default risks over the period 2006-2015, using the credit default swap (CDS) spreads of the bonds of major international banks and of sovereign issuers as indicators of risk within four major European countries. The nexus between bank risk in core countries and sovereign risk of peripheral countries is also analyzed, under the hypothesis that higher bond yields and preferential treatment of bond issued by euro sovereigns under Basle II may have favored the stocking of peripheral sovereign bonds in core bank portfolios. The use of a time-varying regime switching correlation analysis, the STCC-GARCH, allows to identify the economic variable behind the state shifts, the so-called “transition variable”, and to date precisely the changes in the size of the correlations that are due to shocks (viz. the Lehman crisis, the evolution of the Greek crisis) or to unconventional monetary policies such as Quantitative Easing and TLTRO.

ECB President Draghi’s Jackson Hole speech in August 2014 arguably marked a new phase of unconventional monetary policies (UMPs) in the euro area. This paper examines the market impact and tranmission channels of this new wave of UMPs using a modified event study framework. They are found to have a more prominent impact on inflation expectations and exchange rates compared to the earlier UMP announcements. The impact on bank equity, however, is less significant in part due to narrowing profit margin in a low interest rate environment; and the marginal effect on sovereign spread compression has diminished. By extracting components of monetary policy shocks from the yield curve, we find that the traditional signaling channel of the monetary policy transmission continued to play an important role, but the portfolio rebalancing channel became more important in the new phase. Spillovers to non-euro area EU countries (the Czech Republic, Denmark, Poland, and Sweden) are transmitted mainly through the portfolio rebalancing channel, largely affecting sovereign yields and exchange rates.

The sovereign-bank nexus played a key role in the 2009-12 European debt crisis by enabling pernicious dynamics whereby governments and domestic banking sectors mutually enfeebled each other. This paper reviews the direct (financial) channels and the indirect (real) channels through which banks and sovereigns interact, and that can give rise to feedback loops between the two sectors. While significant progress has been achieved in mitigating the direct channel of the loop in recent years, the indirect mechanisms of the loop stayed largely intact. Policy options for improving the financial stability of both banks and sovereigns across the euro area have been discussed, including measures to increase the diversification of banks' sovereign debt holdings. Focusing on diversification as a standalone measure, a review of the literature and model-based simulations suggest an ambiguous impact on systemic risk. However, in those cases where diversification can either reduce total risks or keep them unchanged, it can also deliver an important shock absorption effect in crisis periods. In such cases, simulations show that higher cross-border integration of banking sectors would dilute the impact of asymmetric shocks across the regions of a monetary union, thus increasing the overall welfare of risk averse households.

We analyze the European Central Bank's (ECB's) response to the global financial crisis. Our results suggest that even during the crisis, the core part of ECB's monetary policy transmission-from policy rates to market rates-has continued to operate, but at a decreased efficiency. We also find some evidence that the ECB's non-standard measures, namely the lengthening of the maturity of monetary policy operations and the provision of funds at the fixed rate, reduced money market term spreads, facilitating the pass-through from policy to market rates. Furthermore, the results imply that the substantial increase in the ECB's balance sheet may have contributed to a reduction in government bond term spreads.

Unconventional monetary policy measures implemented by the European Central Bank in recent years have helped to reduce interest rates on sovereign debt in the euro area as a whole. In addition to the direct impact on debt servicing payments, monetary policy conduct in the most recent period has had positive macroeconomic effects which have indirectly impacted the cyclical revenue and expenditure items in the government budget. This article approximately quantifies both direct and indirect effects for the main countries in the euro area.

This paper builds a model-based dynamic monetary and fiscal conditions index (DMFCI) and uses it to examine the evolution of the joint stance of monetary and fiscal policies in the euro area (EA) and in its three largest member countries over the period 2007-2018. The index is based on the relative impacts of monetary and fiscal policy on demand using actual and simulated data from rich estimated models featuring also financial intermediaries and long-term government debt. The analysis highlights a short-lived fiscal expansion in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, followed by a quick tightening, with monetary policy left to be the “only game in town” after 2013. Individual countries’ DMFCIs show that national policy stances did not always mirror the evolution of the aggregate stance at the EA level, due to heterogeneity in the fiscal stance.

We research the association of the sovereign crisis stemming from periphery EMU countries and monetary policy in terms of financial stability. Empirical results are derived on the linkage of monetary policy reflected through interbank lending rates i.e. banking sector fragility to long term sovereign (term) spread premiums pre- and post-Euro Area crisis. Post-crisis the transmission channels of conventional/unconventional monetary policy appear to be ineffective. Moreover, shocks in money market affect more sovereign risk premiums than the opposite. Monetary policy in terms of interbank lending is triggered by countries having banking crises rather sovereign ones.