In “Securities Trading by Banks and Credit Supply: Micro-Evidence”, we explore the effects of the financial crisis on securities trading by commercial banks and the subsequent effect of the latter in credit supply. We find that banks with higher trading expertise increase their investments in securities in crises and decrease their supply of credit.
Banks today hold a considerable amount of securities among their assets. However, there is an important policy and academic debate as to whether they should be able to do so. The investment behavior of banks is portrayed in Figure 1, where was a sharp decline in price in the security around 2009; at the same time, German banks with higher trading expertise increased their holdings of said security.