Discussion Paper

Since the Financial Crisis, Aggregate Payments Have Co-moved with Aggregate Reserves. Why?

Abstract: Fedwire Funds, a key payment system in the United States, is used by banks to wire money to one another throughout the day. Historically, the total value of payments sent over Fedwire has been roughly proportional to economic activity. Since the financial crisis, however, we have instead observed a strong co-movement between total payments and the level of aggregate reserves. This co-movement suggests that a fraction of every dollar of reserves created recirculates on a daily basis. In this post, we investigate why total payments, a flow variable driven by real and financial activity, would co-move with total reserves, a stock variable controlled by the Federal Reserve.

Keywords: payments; reserves;

JEL Classification: G1;

Bibliographic Information

Provider: Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Part of Series: Liberty Street Economics

Publication Date: 2019-11-04

Number: 20191104