In September 2011 new legislation allowed Hungarian households, under certain conditions, to repay their foreign-currency-denominated mortgages at preferential, predetermined exchange rates. This created an open foreign currency position of significant but uncertain size on the balance sheet of...

The basic purpose of this study is to didactically demonstrate the factors shaping the currency swap stock of domestic banks prior to the crisis and to provide a descriptive analysis of how the structure and the functioning of the market changed during the crisis. The main conclusions of the...

Cross-border bank lending to emerging markets dropped sharply in the second half of 2011 as the euro area crisis intensified. We use the BIS international banking statistics to identify the key drivers of this decline. Our results indicate that the latest contraction in cross-border bank lending...