The fundamental theorem of asset pricing in the presence of bid-ask and interest rate spreads

Abstract We establish the fundamental theorem of asset pricing to a model with proportional transaction costs on trading in shares and different interest rates for borrowing and lending of cash. We show that such a model is free of arbitrage if and only if one can embed in it a friction-free model that is itself free of arbitrage, i.e. if there exists an artificial friction-free price for the stock between its bid and ask prices and an artificial interest rate between the borrowing and lending interest rates such that, if one discounts this stock price by this interest rate, then the resulting process is a martingale under some equivalent probability measure.