The BIS international banking statistics have evolved over time in response to changes in the international financial system. The latest enhancements to these statistics introduce information about banks' domestic business and add more details about the counterparties with which banks interact....

We explore the motivations for borrowers to raise foreign currency debt and swap the proceeds into local currency, rather than borrowing the local currency directly. The growing, and in some markets large, volume of such opportunistic swap-covered borrowing, suggests that it can be a...

The BIS has revised its debt securities statistics to enhance their comparability across different markets. International issues have been redefined as debt securities issued outside the market where the borrower resides, and statistics combining international and domestic issues are being...

Emerging and mature financial markets are more integrated today than at any time since the First World War. Net capital flows to emerging markets have yet to return to the levels of the mid-1990s and remain significantly below those reached a century ago. However, cross-border flows provide an...

This paper seeks to understand why Asian foreign investment is concentrated in financial markets outside of the region instead of in Asian markets. We analyse empirically the geographical composition of the cross-border portfolio holdings of more than 40 source countries. We compare these...

The 2019 BIS Triennial Central Bank Survey provided new insights about the boost that electronification gave to trading in FX and OTC derivatives markets, and the role of compression and clearing in containing the growth of outstanding derivatives exposures

We analyse the turnover of fixed income derivatives in seven currencies to test the hypothesis that market participants increasingly use contracts based on private rather than government rates to hedge and to take positions. In the US dollar money market, private benchmarks long ago displaced...

Well developed financial markets are a necessary condition for a currency to play a role as a reserve currency. The introduction of the euro greatly improved the functioning of euro financial markets. This paper investigates whether euro financial markets have developed sufficiently to...

The turmoil in global interbank markets in the second half of 2007 raises questions about the robustness of interbank rate fixings. A comparison of alternative fixings for similar interest rates confirms that they diverged to an unusual extent. Nevertheless, the design of fixing mechanisms...