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The Australian Government Guarantee Scheme for Large Deposits and Wholesale Funding (the Guarantee Scheme) was announced in October 2008 amid extraordinary developments in the global financial system. Given that funding conditions have subsequently improved significantly, and that a number of similar schemes in other countries have closed, the Australian Government has announced that the Guarantee Scheme will also close to new borrowing from 31 March 2010.

This report analyses the main developments in housing finance in the euro area in the decade, covering the period from 1999 to 2007. It looks at mortgage indebtedness, various characteristics of loans for house purchase, the funding of such loans and the spreads between the interest rates on loans granted by banks and the interest rates banks had to pay on their funding, or the return they made on alternative investments. In addition, the report contains a comparison of key aspects of housing finance in the euro area with those in the United Kingdom and the United States. At the end, the report briefly discusses aspects of the transmission of monetary policy to the economy.

Motivated by the recent discussion of the declining importance of deposits as banks' major source of funding we investigate which factors determine funding costs at local banks. Using a panel data set of more than 800 German local savings and cooperative banks for the period from 1998 to 2004 we show that funding costs are not only driven by the relative share of comparatively cheap deposits of bank's liabilities but among other factors especially by the size of the bank. In our empirical analysis we find strong and robust evidence that, ceteris paribus, smaller banks exhibit lower funding costs than larger banks suggesting that small banks are able to attract deposits more cheaply than their larger counterparts. We argue that this is the case because smaller banks interact more personally with customers, operate in customers' geographic proximity and have longer and stronger relationships than larger banks and, hence, are able to charge higher prices for their services. Our finding of a strong influence of bank size on funding costs is also in an in international context of great interest as mergers among small local banks - the key driver of bank growth - are a recent phenomenon not only in European banking that is expected to continue in the future. At the same time, net interest income remains by far the most important source of revenue for most local banks, accounting for approximately 70% of total operating revenues in the case of German local banks. The influence of size on funding costs is of strong economic relevance: our results suggest that an increase in size by 50%, for example, from EUR 500 million in total assets to EUR 750 million (exemplary for M&A transactions among local banks) increases funding costs, ceteris paribus, by approximately 18 basis points which relates to approx. 7% of banks' average net interest margin.

This paper uses panel data on banks, for the period 1991-98, to test the existence of a bank-lending channel in the Spanish economy. In order to distinguish between loan demand and supply movements, several exercises are performed. First, we analyse the differential responses, to monetary policy changes, of bank lending by banks with different size, liquidity and capitalisation. Second, we analyse the response to an exogenous deposit-reducing shock a tax-induced shift from deposits to mutual fund shares). As this involves a pure loan supply shock, it best solves the above-mentioned identification problem. Our results are mostly against the existence of a bank-lending channel in the period under analysis. This result appears to be related to the important role of many small banks as collectors of savings, meaning they have a large volume of resources available for lending