Deviations from covered interest parity (CIP) represent an arbitrage opportunity, at least in theory. In a new paper, we show that post-crisis financial regulation may explain why this mispricing persists and cannot be arbitraged away. Our exercise uses a unique dataset on contract-level foreign exchange derivatives coupled with an exogenous variation associated with the public disclosure of the leverage ratio. We find that dealers with a higher leverage ratio demand an extra premium from their clients for synthetic dollar funding (e.g., borrowing in euros and swapping into dollars) relative to direct dollar funding (i.e., borrowing dollars in the money market), resulting in CIP deviations.
The full article is available at https://bankunderground.co.uk/2019/05/09/currency-mispricing-and-dealer-balance-sheets