The effects of two-way lending between financial conglomerates in bilateral repo markets

We examine how market structure, market power, and systemic risk respond to close and intense lending relationships between financial conglomerates (FCs) in non-centrally cleared bilateral repo. Using transaction-level data from Mexico, we document persistent and stable funding relationships between FC-affiliated banks and funds with two distinctive features: first, funding transactions are two-way, that is, a given pair of rival FCs provide lending to one another on the same day; second, two-way transactions are executed at lower average rates than one-way transactions. We show that two-way lending between FCs favours both market concentration and market power of FC-affiliated funds, and worsens the terms of trade of independent banks’ and funds’ lending. Furthermore, we find that the bank-level contribution to systemic risk increases with two-way lending.