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The relationship between international financial linkages and the synchronization of business cycles is ambiguous. In cross-section, business cycles in countries with large cross-holdings of nancial assets are highly correlated; but over time, capital ows between economies that are out of sync. This could mean that economies with highly correlated business cycles tend to be financially integrated because of time-invariant social or cultural commonalities, or that the consequences of financial linkages on cycle synchronization depend on the frequency of observation. This paper introduces panel estimations that include country-pair xed eects, but let the frequency of observation vary. The relationship between international financial linkages and the synchronization of business cycles is signicantly negative at high frequencies, and converges rapidly to zero at low frequencies. This masks a composition eect: The relation is negative for loans to the non-nancial sector, but it is positive for loans to financial institutions. Both estimates increase in absolute value with the time horizon. Therefore, at low frequencies, bank lending to the real sector corresponds to a diversication motive, but lending to the financial sector is associated with contagion.