Altunbas, Gambacorta and Marques (2007) point in this direction and suggest that asset securitization may have reduced the importance of the bank lending channel for monetary policy transmission. Further, it allows banks to transfer parts of their credit risk to other market participants such as institutional investors. Thus, those banks that use securitization more intensively are better sheltered against monetary policy.
This high amount of foreign currency loans is tightly monitored by the Austrian authorities and has already entailed a number of supervisory actions, including the introduction of a set of recommendations called “Minimum Standards of Granting and Managing Foreign Currency Loans.”  2  FSAPs are designed to assess the stability of a financial system as well as to identify and remedy weaknesses in a country’s financial sector structure.