【英文】罗兰贝格报告：如果美元失去了世界储备货币的地位（15页）

英文研究报告 2023年08月11日 07:41 管理员

Historically, only a handful of countries possessed deep and liquid markets for domestic currency assets that were open to the rest of the world. Since the early 2000s, there has been a massive increase in foreign exchange trading volumes of nontraditional currencies, i.e. currencies other than USD, EUR, GBP or JPY. Non-traditional currency markets have been very illiquid due to high transaction costs. To swap these currencies, FX dealers had to use traditional currencies, such as the USD, as an intermediary. With the rise of electronic trading platforms and automatization programs in forex markets, transaction costs for non-traditional currencies were signifcantly reduced, thus also reducing the dependency of using other currencies, including the USD, as an in-between. Furthermore, the growing global network of central bank currency swap lines enabled institutional investors to access other currencies more easy.

With central banks assets around the world mounting, central bank reserve managers have become more dynamic in chasing returns. When reserves exceed the level associated with reserve adequacy, reserve managers come to distinguish diferent reserve tranches. The minimum required for reserve adequacy ("liquidity tranche"), should be held in liquid, low-risk assets, while the remainder (the "investment tranche") can be more actively managed, keeping returns in mind, and invested in less liquid assets. With the Federal Reserve ofering extremely low interest rates in recent years as part of its ultra-loose monetary policy, reserve managers sought out new investment targets in countries that ofered at least some yield on safe assets. Contrary to bond yields in the big four currency areas, namely the US, Eurozone, Japan and UK, volatilityadjusted returns in non-traditional currency markets have been more attractive in recent years.