The Dark Side of Bank Wholesale Funding Rocco Huang Lev Ratnovski Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia International Monetary Fund September 2009 Abstract Commercial banks increasingly use short-term wholesale funds to supplement traditional retail deposits. Existing literature mainly points to the "bright side" of wholesale funding: sophisticated …nanciers can monitor banks, disciplining bad ones but re…nancing solvent ones. This paper models a "dark side" of wholesale funding. In an environment with a costless but imperfect signal on bank project quality (e.g., credit ratings, performance of peers), short-term wholesale …nanciers have lower incentives to conduct costly information acquisition, and instead may withdraw based on negative but noisy public signals, triggering ine¢ cient liquidations. We show that the "dark side" of wholesale funding dominates the "bright side" when bank assets are more arm’s length and tradable (leading to more relevant public signals and lower liquidation costs): precisely the attributes of a banking sector with securitizations and risk transfers. The results shed light on the recent …nancial turmoil, explaining why some wholesale …nanciers did not provide market discipline ex-ante and exacerbated liquidity risks ex-post. Email addresses:
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[email protected]. We thank two referees, Viral Acharya (the Editor), Stijn Claessens, and Charles Kahn for very helpful comments. We also ap- preciate the useful comments from the participants of the Cleveland Fed Conference on Identifying and Resolving Financial Crises, Basel Committee-CEPR-JFI Workshop on Risk Transfer Mechanisms and Financial Stability, RUG-DNB-JFS Conference on Micro and Macro Perspectives on Financial Stability, CREDIT conference (Venice), IMF-World Bank conference on Risk Analysis and Risk Management, Bank of Canada workshop on Securitized Instruments, CesIfo-Bundesbank conference on Risk Trans- fer, Federal Reserve System Committee on Financial Structure and Regulation, and European Banking Center conference on Financial Stability.