Banking and Trading

We study the interaction between relationship banking and short-term arm’s length activities of banks, called trading. We show that a bank can use the franchise value of its relationships to expand the scale of trading, but may allocate too much capital to trading ex post , compromising its ability to build relationships ex ante . This effect is reinforced when trading is used for risk shifting. Overall, combining relationship banking and trading offers benefits under small-scale trading, but distortions may dominate when trading is unbridled. This suggests that trading by banks, while benign historically, might be distortive with deeper financial markets.