It is more than usual to read articles examining the Euro boom years which tend to suggest that capital inflows from the core funded the credit expansion in the periphery. Although that line of reasoning is not wrong when examining capital flows between countries, I do not think it is entirely correct in the case of a monetary union such as the Eurozone.

The main reason is the fact that the Eurosystem is structured in such as way that it is accommodating of capital flows between Eurozone members through overdrafts at the NCBs and unlimited Target2 credit. Banks as suppliers of credit and creators of deposits do not need a pre-existing stock of funds, nor to they need to pre-finance any outflows to other Euro members.

More specifically imagine the following example depicting the normal flow of credit and cross-border flows:

  1. A bank customer in Greece applies to a Greek bank for a loan to fund a new investment project (which will require German manufactured capital goods).
  2. The bank extends the loan and credits the corresponding customer’s bank account. No actual funds are needed by the bank apart from the 2% reserve requirements (which is elastically provided by the ECB).
  3. The customer pays for the capital good by transferring funds to a German bank. For the transaction to take place, the  Greek bank debits its reserve account at the Bank of Greece with the corresponding amount and BoG increases its Target2 net liability position. In case the Greek bank is short of reserves (compared to average reserve requirements) it can source funds at the BoG marginal lending facility, at the weekly MRO or at the interbank (repo) market.
  4. Since the interbank repo rate is quite favorable compared to the marginal facility rate, the Greek bank will use high quality bonds from its bond portfolio (mainly Greek government bonds) to source funds from the European interbank repo market using the bonds as collateral. It is clear at this point that the new bank loan remains on the Greek bank books and is never transferred outside its balance sheet, nor does it play any significant role in the cross-border flows.
  5. Apart from the increase in bank liabilities to RoW (described in (4)), periphery countries also saw a large increase in the amount of government bonds held by the foreign sector. As a result, instead of (4), Greek banks could just use the flow of funds from abroad (which were used to acquire Greek government bonds) to repay their (extra) liabilities towards the BoG and maintain a stable amount of interbank funding. It should be noted at this point that any inflows of funds either from the interbank market or from foreigners for the purpose of buying government bonds will lower the net liability position of BoG to the rest of the Eurosystem (a position that actually remained quite small until the start of the 2008 crisis).

What is clear from the above is that cross border flows are accommodating (in the sense that central bank financing is always available to cover them) and that the reason of incoming flows has almost nothing to do with the original loans and transactions (in our case a bank loan to pay for an investment project ends up in a cross border liability of the government or the banking system).

Financing of cross border flows was always provided by the Eurosystem. Inflows of funds to buy government bonds and interbank loans were merely used by the banking system as a cheaper source of funds instead of large liability positions towards the corresponding NCB. Capital inflows did not ‘fund investment in the periphery’ but were the result of foreign portfolio preferences and mostly changed the composition of the net liability position in the periphery away from Target2 liabilities which were replaced by higher liabilities of the government and banking sector.