Page 87 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 2

IPS184 Kimiaki S. et al.
4. Conclusion Remarks
The IBS are fundamental statistics for capturing capital flows and credit
exposures through internationally active banks. In the IBS, reporting practices
of trustee business vary across reporting countries. While the BOJ reports
figures that include positions both on trust-account and bankaccount bases,
banks of other major nationalities do not include trust-account-based
positions in their figures but they report figures based solely on banking
accounts. Differences in the coverage of the positions should therefore be
taken into account when carrying out international comparative analysis using
the IBS. This paper has broken down the IBS in Japan into (1) positions held
by trust banks, and (2) those of residual banks, and attempted to carry out an
international comparison by treating the latter as an estimate of banking-
account-based positions of Japanese banks as a whole.
Examining Japanese banks’ international credit exposures with the use of
the aforementioned estimates, while Japanese banks have been increasing
their foreign claims in recent years, the ratio of their foreign claims relative to
their total assets in the banking sector is not as high as those of banks of other
major nationalities. It has also illustrated that Japanese banks’ claims vis-à-vis
the United States account for more or less half of their overall foreign claims.
Likewise, in terms of currency, U.S. dollar-denominated claims account for a
large share of the foreign claims held by Japanese banks. In the context of
aspects of U.S. dollar funding, with the objective of examining cross-currency
funding, we have determined the ratio of (1) the differential between the U.S.
dollar-denominated international claims and liabilities, relative to (2) the U.S.
dollar-denominated international claims, for banks of each major nationality
using the IBS. The results have demonstrated that the banking-based ratio is
significantly smaller than the banking-and-trust-account-based one for
Japanese banks, indicating that the former is not extremely high on an
international scale. Moreover, from a timeseries perspective, their share has
remained more or less unchanged.
The BIS and the central banks worldwide have enhanced the IBS in the
wake of the experience such as various global financial crises. The IBS enable
one to provide a quantitative evaluation of past international capital flows and
credit exposures through the banking sector with the breakdowns of their
positions. The IBS are therefore considered to be growing in importance for
analysis of Japanese banks, which have expanded the size of external claims,
particularly in recent years. The BOJ will continue to contribute to further
developments and enhancements of the statistics in cooperation with the BIS
while paying concurrent attention to reporting burdens placed on reporting
banks. Moreover, the BOJ will work on further enhancements to the usability
and convenience of the IBS in Japan.

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