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Liquidity and Trading Dynamics in the Off-the-Run U.S. Treasury Market
In this article, we study trading activity and liquidity of off-the-run U.S. Treasury securities. Off-the-run Treasuries are seasoned securities, account for about 98 percent of all Treasuries outstanding, and played a central role in the pandemic-fueled dash-for-cash in March 2020. Understanding these securities better can improve thinking around how market resilience might be improved. We document and discuss the evolution of trading activity and liquidity for these securities and how these attributes differ from on-the-run securities. We also consider several potential market structure ...
Discussion Paper
The Fed’s Treasury Purchase Prices During the Pandemic
In March 2020, the Federal Reserve commenced purchases of U.S. Treasury securities to address the market disruptions caused by the pandemic. This post assesses the execution quality of those purchases by comparing the Fed’s purchase prices to contemporaneous market prices. Although past work has considered this question in the context of earlier asset purchases, the market dysfunction spurred by the pandemic means that execution quality at that time may have differed. Indeed, we find that the Fed’s execution quality was unusually good in 2020 in that the Fed bought Treasuries at prices ...
Discussion Paper
Liquidity Fades as Treasuries Age
More than $30 trillion U.S. Treasury debt is outstanding. Less than 4 percent of this amount, which is associated with the most recently issued Treasuries, called on-the-run securities, accounts for 65 percent of average daily trading volume. The remaining portion of the amount outstanding is accounted for by seasoned issues that have been replaced by newer benchmarks, which are referred to as off-the-run securities. In this post, we review the key results in our paper that uses transaction-level Treasury TRACE data to study how trading activity and liquidity evolve as securities move from ...