Search Results
Working Paper
An assessment of the impact of Japanese foreign exchange intervention: 1991-2004
We analyze the short-term price impact of Japanese foreign exchange intervention operations between 1991 and 2004, using official data from Japan's Ministry of Finance. Over the period as a whole, we find some evidence of a modest "against the wind" effect, but interventions do not have value as a forecast that the exchange rate will move in a direction consistent with the operations. Interventions conducted between 1995 and 2002, which were large and infrequent, met with a much higher degree of success. For the most recent episode of intervention, in 2003 and 2004, despite the record size ...
Discussion Paper
2nd Annual International Roles of the U.S. Dollar Conference
The U.S. dollar plays a central role in the global economy. In addition to being the most widely used currency in foreign exchange transactions, it represents the largest share in official reserves, international debt securities and loans, cross-border payments, and trade invoicing.
Report
All-to-All Trading in the U.S. Treasury Market
Although the U.S. Treasury market remains the deepest and most liquid securities market in the world, several episodes of market dysfunction over recent years have brought the market’s resilience into focus. The adoption of all-to-all trading in the Treasury market could be one avenue to strengthening market resilience. Conceptually, all-to-all trading would allow any market participant to trade directly with any other market participant. This could be helpful in times of stress when the capacity of traditional intermediaries may be tested. In this article, we discuss what all-to-all ...
Working Paper
The Evolution of Price Discovery in an Electronic Market
We study the evolution of the price discovery process in the euro-dollar and dollar-yen currency pairs over a ten-year period on the EBS platform, a global trading venue used by both manual and automated traders. We find that the importance of market orders decreases sharply over that period, owing mainly to a decline in the information share from manual trading, while the information share of market orders from algorithmic and high-frequency traders remains fairly constant. At the same time, there is a substantial, but gradual, increase in the information share of limit orders. Price ...
Working Paper
What can the data tell us about carry trades in Japanese yen?
This paper examines the available data that may shed light on the carry trade in Japanese yen. We define an individual or a sector to be engaged in the carry trade if it has a short position in yen and a long position in other currencies. The tendency of large yen movements to be skewed toward appreciations is consistent with the existence of substantial carry positions, and other evidence from market prices provides some modest support for an effect from the carry trade. Data on bank loans and bond holdings by currency reveal a large apparent yen carry position of the Japanese official ...
Working Paper
Trading activity and exchange rates in high-frequency EBS data
The absence of data has, until now, precluded virtually all research on trading volume in the foreign exchange market. This paper introduces a new high-frequency foreign exchange dataset from EBS (Electronic Broking Service) that includes trading volume in the global interdealer spot market. The dataset gives volumes and prices at the one-minute frequency over a five-year time period in the euro-dollar and dollar-yen currency pairs. We first document intraday volume patterns in euro-dollar and dollar-yen trading, noting the effects of macroeconomic news announcements but also purely ...
Working Paper
Uncovered interest parity: it works, but not for long
The failure of uncovered interest parity can be ascribed to the existence of a risk premium. The size of this risk premium may shrink to zero over sufficiently small intervals of time. In contrast, because no interest is paid on intradaily positions and interest is instead paid discretely at the point when a position is rolled over from one day to the next, the size of the interest differential remains fixed over any interval that covers the time of the discrete interest payment. This is true no matter how short that interval is. Using a large dataset of high frequency exchange rate data, we ...
Working Paper
Frequency of observation and the estimation of integrated volatility in deep and liquid financial markets
Using two newly available ultrahigh-frequency datasets, we investigate empirically how frequently one can sample certain foreign exchange and U.S. Treasury security returns without contaminating estimates of their integrated volatility with market microstructure noise. Using volatility signature plots and a recently-proposed formal decision rule to select the sampling frequency, we find that one can sample FX returns as frequently as once every 15 to 20 seconds without contaminating volatility estimates; bond returns may be sampled as frequently as once every 2 to 3 minutes on days without ...
Report
The Global Dash for Cash: Why Sovereign Bond Market Functioning Varied across Jurisdictions in March 2020
As the economic disruptions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic increased in March 2020, there was a global dash-for-cash by investors. This selling pressure occurred across advanced sovereign bond markets and caused a deterioration in market functioning, leading to central bank interventions. We show that these market disruptions occurred disproportionately in the U.S. Treasury market and were due to investors’ selling pressures being far more pronounced and broad-based. Furthermore, we assess differences in key drivers of the market disruptions across sovereign bond markets, based on an ...