Relative Pricing of Private and Public Debt: The Role of Money Creation Channel

Abstract

We examine how the money creation function of banks affects the relative cost of firm financing in the bank loan vs public bond market – the loan-bond spread. Using a sample of loans and bonds issued by the same firm with the same maturity and at the same time, we show that the loan-bond spread is lower for firms impacted by information cost shocks. We call this decline in the relative cost of bank credit induced by firm information cost shock the opacity discount and argue that it is consistent with the “money creation” hypothesis in the theory of financial intermediation according to which banks need to keep information about their assets secret to produce private money.