Global banks played a significant role in transmitting the 2007-09 financial crisis to emerging-market (EM) economies. The authors examine adverse liquidity shocks on main developed-country banking systems and their relationships to EM across Europe, Asia, and Latin Amer., isolating loan supply from loan demand effects. Loan supply in EM across Europe, Asia, and Latin Amer. was affected significantly through three separate channels: (1) a contraction in direct, cross-border lending by foreign banks; (2) a contraction in local lending by foreign banks¿ affiliates in EM; and (3) a contraction in loan supply by domestic banks, resulting from the funding shock to their balance sheets induced by the decline in interbank, cross-border lending. Charts and tables.

We study the transmission of financial sector shocks across borders through international bank connections. For this purpose, we use data on long-term interbank loans among more than 6,000 banks during 1997-2012 to construct a yearly global network of interbank exposures. We estimate the effect of direct (first-degree) and indirect (second-degree) exposures to countries experiencing systemic banking crises on bank profitability and loan supply. We find that direct exposures to crisis countries squeeze banks' profit margins, thereby reducing their returns. Indirect exposures to crisis countries enhance this effect, while indirect exposures to non-crisis countries mitigate it. Furthermore, crisis exposures have real effects in that they reduce banks' supply of domestic and cross-border loans. Our results, based on a large global sample, support the notion that interconnected financial systems facilitate shock transmission.

How does domestic monetary policy in systemic countries spillover to the rest of the world? This paper examines the transmission channel of domestic monetary policy in the cross-border context. We use exogenous shocks to monetary policy in systemically important economies, including the U.S., and local projections to estimate the dynamic effect of monetary policy shocks on bilateral cross-border bank lending. We find robust evidence that an increase in funding costs following an exogenous monetary tightening leads to a statistically and economically significant decline in cross-border bank lending. The effect is weakened during periods of high uncertainty. In contrast, the effect is found to not vary according to the degree of borrower country riskiness, further weakening support for the international portfolio rebalancing channel.

This paper analyses the nature of the increasing regionalization process in global banking. Despite the large decline in aggregate cross-border banking lending volumes, some parts of the global banking network are currently more interlinked regionally than before the Global Financial Crisis. After developing a simple theoretical model capturing banks' internationalization decisions, our estimation shows that this regionalization trend is present even after controlling for traditional gravitational variables (e.g. distance, language, legal system, etc.), especially among lenders in EMs and non-core banking systems, such as Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Moreover, this regionalization trend was present before the GFC, but it has increased since then, and it seems to be associated with regulatory variables and the opportunities created by the retrenchment of several European lenders.

Global banks played a significant role in the transmission of the 2007 to 2009 crisis to emerging market economies. We examine the relationships between adverse liquidity shocks on main developed-country banking systems to emerging markets across Europe, Asia, and Latin America, isolating loan supply from loan demand effects. Loan supply in emerging markets was significantly affected through three separate channels: a contraction in direct, cross-border lending by foreign banks; a contraction in local lending by foreign banks' affiliates in emerging markets; and a contraction in loan supply by domestic banks resulting from the funding shock to their balance sheet induced by the decline in interbank, cross-border lending. Policy interventions, such as the Vienna Initiative introduced in Europe, influenced the lending channel effects on emerging markets of head office balance sheet shocks.

Effective cross-border financial surveillance requires the monitoring of direct and indirect systemic linkages. This paper illustrates how network analysis could make a significant contribution in this regard by simulating different credit and funding shocks to the banking systems of a number of selected countries. After that, we show that the inclusion of risk transfers could modify the risk profile of entire financial systems, and thus an enriched simulation algorithm able to account for risk transfers is proposed. Finally, we discuss how some of the limitations of our simulations are a reflection of existing information and data gaps, and thus view these shortcomings as a call to improve the collection and analysis of data on cross-border financial exposures.