One of the markets banks use to fund lending in foreign currencies – namely, using FX swaps to fund FX lending synthetically – has seen large dislocations in its pricing since the Global Crisis. This column documents that such dislocations affect the supply of cross-border FX credit of UK-based banks. Access to foreign relatives matters as banks employ their internal capital markets to shield themselves from the effects, while banks outside the UK not affected by changes to synthetic funding costs are an important source of (partial) substitution.
Link: Global banks and synthetic funding: The benefits of foreign relatives