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Working Paper
Panic, liquidity and the lender of last resort: a strategic analysis
This paper develops a model in which panics are caused by the strategic behavior of agents who temporarily monopolize the supply of privately controlled cash reserves. The decision to exercise this "monopoly power" results in localized "corners" on the money market and hence an abrupt alteration in the rate of exchange between cash and non-monetary assets. This sudden appearance of a premium on liquidity produces the dramatic increase in interest rates, decrease in security prices and wave of "contagious" bank runs which are characteristic of panics. Since the nonzero probability of a ...