The global financial crisis and the behavior of short-term interest rates: International and Serbian aspects

Throughout the current global financial crisis the market has continued to fall due to a lack of confidence of those banks that are not yet prepared to lend on the interbank money market. For instance, the negative repercussions of the crisis onto the Serbian financial sector have created a number of issues including a significant increase in lending rates, a difficulty, or impossibility, for the corporate sector to use cheap cross-border loans and a reduction in the supply of foreign exchange on that basis. The inability of the National Bank of Serbia to follow the aggressive reduction of the key interest rate that has been implemented by central banks in developed countries, partly explains the lack of a decline in short-term interest rates by the Serbian banking industry. The first section of the paper focuses on the effects of the financial crisis through the behavior of short-term interest rates in the US and Europe, while the second section gives an estimation of the effects of the global financial crisis on interest rates in the banking industry in Serbia.