IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/boe/boeewp/0953.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

An unintended consequence of holding dollar assets

Author

Listed:
  • Czech, Robert

    (Bank of England)

  • Huang, Shiyang

    (University of Hong Kong)

  • Lou, Dong

    (London School of Economics)

  • Wang, Tianyu

    (Tsinghua University)

Abstract

We study investor trading behaviour and yield patterns in the UK government bond market during the recent Covid crisis. We show that the yield spike in mid-March 2020 was accompanied by heavy selling of gilts by UK-based insurance companies and pension funds (ICPFs), which we argue was an indirect result of the US dollar’s global prominence. Non-US institutions invest a large portion of their capital in dollar assets and hedge their dollar exposures by selling dollars forward through FX derivatives. In crisis periods, dollars appreciate against other currencies. To meet margin calls on these short-dollar FX positions, non-US institutions sell their domestic safe assets, thereby contributing to the yield spikes in domestic markets.

Suggested Citation

  • Czech, Robert & Huang, Shiyang & Lou, Dong & Wang, Tianyu, 2021. "An unintended consequence of holding dollar assets," Bank of England working papers 953, Bank of England.
    • Handle: RePEc:boe:boeewp:0953
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/working-paper/2021/an-unintended-consequence-of-holding-dollar-assets.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Andreas Schrimpf & Hyun Song Shin & Vladyslav Sushko, 2020. "Leverage and margin spirals in fixed income markets during the Covid-19 crisis," BIS Bulletins 2, Bank for International Settlements.
    2. Bardoscia, Marco & Ferrara, Gerardo & Vause, Nicholas & Yoganayagam, Michael, 2021. "Simulating liquidity stress in the derivatives market," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 133(C).
    3. Greenwood, Robin & Thesmar, David, 2011. "Stock price fragility," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 102(3), pages 471-490.
    4. Valentin Haddad & Alan Moreira & Tyler Muir, 2021. "When Selling Becomes Viral: Disruptions in Debt Markets in the COVID-19 Crisis and the Fed’s Response [Funding value adjustments]," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 34(11), pages 5309-5351.
    5. Czech, Robert & Huang, Shiyang & Lou, Dong & Wang, Tianyu, 2021. "Informed trading in government bond markets," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 142(3), pages 1253-1274.
    6. Vayanos, Dimitri, 2004. "Flight to quality, flight to liquidity, and the pricing of risk," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 456, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    7. Marc F. Bellemare & Casey J. Wichman, 2020. "Elasticities and the Inverse Hyperbolic Sine Transformation," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 82(1), pages 50-61, February.
    8. Coval, Joshua & Stafford, Erik, 2007. "Asset fire sales (and purchases) in equity markets," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 86(2), pages 479-512, November.
    9. repec:oup:rfinst:v:25:y::i:12:p:3457-3489 is not listed on IDEAS
    10. Philip Bond & Alex Edmans & Itay Goldstein, 2012. "The Real Effects of Financial Markets," Annual Review of Financial Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 4(1), pages 339-360, October.
    11. Alex Edmans & Itay Goldstein & Wei Jiang, 2012. "The Real Effects of Financial Markets: The Impact of Prices on Takeovers," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 67(3), pages 933-971, June.
    12. Dong Lou, 2012. "A Flow-Based Explanation for Return Predictability," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 25(12), pages 3457-3489.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kristy Jansen & Sven Klingler & Angelo Ranaldo & Patty Duijm, 2024. "Pension Liquidity Risk," Working Papers 801, DNB.
    2. Jordan Barone & Alain P. Chaboud & Adam Copeland & Cullen Kavoussi & Frank M. Keane & Seth Searls, 2023. "The Global Dash for Cash: Why Sovereign Bond Market Functioning Varied across Jurisdictions in March 2020," Economic Policy Review, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, vol. 29(3), pages 1-29, December.
    3. Maddalena Ghio & Linda Rousova & Dilyara Salakhova & Mr. German Villegas Bauer, 2023. "Derivative Margin Calls: A New Driver of MMF Flows," IMF Working Papers 2023/061, International Monetary Fund.
    4. Leonie Bräuer & Harald Hau, 2022. "Can Time-Varying Currency Risk Hedging Explain Exchange Rates?," CESifo Working Paper Series 10065, CESifo.
    5. Cesa-Bianchi, Ambrogio & Eguren-Martin, Fernando, 2021. "Dash for dollars," Bank of England working papers 932, Bank of England.
    6. Bardoscia, Marco & Caccioli, Fabio & Gao, Haotian, 2022. "Efficiency of central clearing under liquidity stress," Bank of England working papers 1002, Bank of England.
    7. Jukonis, Audrius & Letizia, Elisa & Rousová, Linda, 2022. "The impact of derivatives collateralisation on liquidity risk: evidence from the investment fund sector," Working Paper Series 2756, European Central Bank.
    8. Yannis Dafermos & Daniela Gabor & Jo Michell, 2023. "FX swaps, shadow banks and the global dollar footprint," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 55(4), pages 949-968, June.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Broman, Markus S., 2020. "Local demand shocks, excess comovement and return predictability," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 119(C).
    2. Bian, Jiangze & Da, Zhi & He, Zhiguo & Lou, Dong & Shue, Kelly & Zhou, Hao, 2021. "Margin trading and leverage management," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 118851, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    3. Steven Chong Xiao, 2020. "Do Noisy Stock Prices Impede Real Efficiency?," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 66(12), pages 5990-6014, December.
    4. Peress, Joel & Schmidt, Daniel, 2021. "Noise traders incarnate: Describing a realistic noise trading process," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 54(C).
    5. Philippe van der Beck & Jean-Philippe Bouchaud & Dario Villamaina, 2024. "Ponzi Funds," Papers 2405.12768, arXiv.org.
    6. Larrain, Borja & Muñoz, Daniel & Tessada, José, 2017. "Asset fire sales in equity markets: Evidence from a quasi-natural experiment," Journal of Financial Intermediation, Elsevier, vol. 30(C), pages 71-85.
    7. Bidder, Rhys & Coen, Jamie & Lepore, Caterina & Silvestri, Laura, 2024. "Whose asset sales matter?," Bank of England working papers 1088, Bank of England.
    8. Johan Sulaeman & Kelsey D. Wei, 2019. "Sell-Side Analysts and Stock Mispricing: Evidence from Mutual Fund Flow-Driven Trading Pressure," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 65(11), pages 5427-5448, November.
    9. Cook, Douglas O. & Luo, Shikong (Scott), 2023. "Fund flow-induced volatility and the cost of debt," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 146(C).
    10. Glossner, Simon & Matos, Pedro Pinto & Ramelli, Stefano & Wagner, Alexander F., 2022. "Do institutional investors stabilize equity markets in crisis periods? Evidence from COVID-19," CEPR Discussion Papers 15070, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    11. Jiang, Jinglin & Nanda, Vikram & Xiao, Steven Chong, 2021. "Stock-market disruptions and corporate disclosure policies," Journal of Corporate Finance, Elsevier, vol. 66(C).
    12. An, Li & Argyle, Bronson, 2021. "Overselling winners and losers: How mutual fund managers' trading behavior affects asset prices," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 55(C).
    13. Olivier Dessaint & Jacques Olivier & Clemens A Otto & David Thesmar, 2021. "CAPM-Based Company (Mis)valuations [Credit lines as monitored liquidity insurance: Theory and evidence]," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 34(1), pages 1-66.
    14. Gredil, Oleg R. & Kapadia, Nishad & Lee, Jung Hoon, 2022. "On the information content of credit ratings and market-based measures of default risk," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 146(1), pages 172-204.
    15. Chernenko, Sergey & Sunderam, Adi, 2020. "Do fire sales create externalities?," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 135(3), pages 602-628.
    16. Li, Frank Weikai & Sun, Chengzhu, 2022. "Information acquisition and expected returns: Evidence from EDGAR search traffic," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 141(C).
    17. Dimitri Vayanos & Paul Woolley, 2013. "An Institutional Theory of Momentum and Reversal," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 26(5), pages 1087-1145.
    18. Duncan, Elizabeth & Horvath, Akos & Iercosan, Diana & Loudis, Bert & Maddrey, Alice & Martinez, Francis & Mooney, Timothy & Ranish, Ben & Wang, Ke & Warusawitharana, Missaka & Wix, Carlo, 2022. "COVID-19 as a stress test: Assessing the bank regulatory framework," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 61(C).
    19. Glebkin, Sergei & Kuong, John Chi-Fong, 2023. "When large traders create noise," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 150(2).
    20. Itzhak Ben-DAVID & Francesco A. FRANZONI & Rabih MOUSSAWI & John SEDUNOV III, 2015. "The Granular Nature of Large Institutional Investors," Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper Series 15-67, Swiss Finance Institute, revised Apr 2016.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Covid crisis; gilt yields; variation margin; FX derivatives; global reserve currency; currency hedging;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • F31 - International Economics - - International Finance - - - Foreign Exchange
    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
    • G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing; Trading Volume; Bond Interest Rates
    • G15 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - International Financial Markets
    • G22 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Insurance; Insurance Companies; Actuarial Studies
    • G23 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Non-bank Financial Institutions; Financial Instruments; Institutional Investors

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:boe:boeewp:0953. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Digital Media Team (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/boegvuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.