The Urgency to Borrow in the Interbank Market

We study the motivations of interbank market traders around the 2007-09 subprime crisis with a new statistic that reveals the underlying urgency to borrow overnight funds, which we call Trading Urgency. We find that Trading Urgency leads sovereign CDS spreads and reacts to non-standard central bank interventions introduced during the crisis. Our results shed light on the channels that give rise to the sovereign-bank nexus by mapping the linkages between the interbank market and sovereigns