Authour: Yongo Kwon(Bank of Korea), Mira Kim(Bank of Korea), Inhwan So(Bank of Korea)

<Abstract>

Given the US dollar’s status as a global safe haven, global factors, such as US monetary policy, may have considerable impacts on financial markets in other countries. Regarding such hypothesis, this paper looked at the impacts of US monetary policy on domestic bond and FX swap markets through an event study. According to our analysis, US monetary policy had significant positive impacts on domestic interest rates. In particular, it turned out to have bigger impacts on long-term products with high term premiums. By period, the correlation between US monetary policy and domestic interest rates was not significant before the financial crisis, but was clearly positive after the crisis. The US conventional monetary policy was seen to have big impacts on short-term and medium-term KTB yields, while its unconventional monetary policy had major impacts on long-term KTB yields. Moreover, FX swap rates reacted very sensitively to US monetary policy shocks before the financial crisis, while they did not show any significant reactions after the crisis. This suggests that, in line with the covered interest rate parity, the impact of US monetary policy shocks was transmitted to domestic financial markets mainly through swap rate adjustments before the global financial crisis, but through the changes in domestic interest rates during the post-crisis period.