E50 - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit: GeneralReturn

The paper examines the Czech crown money market in terms of products and volumes traded. The interest rate time series for the last 10 years are surveyed, and a parsimonious model is used to investigate to what extent the marketplace serves as the starting point for pricing customer cash products. Although satisfactory long-term relationships are observed, market disruptions are breaking up the assumed coherence. Special attention has to be paid to the decoupling of official fixing rates (PRIBOR) and real market rates in the current low interest rate environment.

This study argues that increasing malinvestment in an economy raises the actual credit risk but not the calculated credit risk until the onset of a recession. To this end, I analyse the relationship between credit risk and malinvestment in Germany, Spain, and Italy using a credit risk indicator based on nonfinancial corporate bond yields and annual loan growth for nonfinancial corporations from January 2004 to November 2014 on a monthly basis. The study also analyses Italy using sectorial non-performing loans data since Italy was the most affected by malinvestment among the countries in question. As a result, this paper suggests that banks should include malinvestment as a subcomponent of credit risk and recognize that the actual credit risk is higher than the calculated credit risk during artificial booms. This recommendation also underscores that malinvestment should be analysed more empirically.