Search Results
Briefing
Who Borrows From the Discount Window in "Normal" Times?
New rules mandate the release of transaction-level data on loans at the Federal Reserve's discount window. This higher level of transparency has created an opportunity to learn more about the role of the discount window outside of crisis periods. These data show that larger and less liquid banks use the discount window more actively and that holdings of bank reserves are negatively correlated with discount window borrowing. Access to the discount window affects bank portfolio decisions, in particular holdings of reserves, in subtle ways.
Journal Article
The Fed's Discount Window: An Overview of Recent Data
From July 2010 until June 2015, the Federal Reserve made over 16,000 loans to financial institutions through the discount window. Recent regulations mandate the release of detailed information about individual loans two years after their occurrence. We study the newly available loan data and uncover the main patterns that broadly describe activity at the Fed's discount window in recent years.
Briefing
Bank Resolution and the Fed’s New Standing Repo Facility
In July 2021, the Fed put a new lending program in place: the Standing Repo Facility. The program will likely impact the financial system in multiple ways. One specific area of influence is the process of resolution planning at large banking corporations. How the facility interacts with those plans will depend in part on guidance provided by regulators as resolution planning continues evolving.
Briefing
Large Excess Reserves and the Relationship between Money and Prices
As a consequence of the Federal Reserve's response to the financial crisis of 2007?08 and the Great Recession, the supply of reserves in the U.S. banking system increased dramatically. Historically, over long horizons, money and prices have been closely tied together, but over the past decade, prices have risen only modestly while base money (reserves plus currency) has grown substantially. A macroeconomic model helps explain this behavior and suggests some potential limits to the Fed's ability to increase the size of its balance sheet indefinitely while remaining consistent with its ...
Briefing
Fed Balance Sheet Normalization and the Minimum Level of Ample Reserves
The normalization process of the Fed's balance sheet is ongoing. Current plans for monetary policy implementation interact with this process. In particular, normalization is aimed at ultimately providing a minimum level of "ample" reserves. The timing for when that level of reserves will be reached depends on multiple factors. Based on assumptions reflecting current expectations of the evolution of those factors in the medium term, normalization will be completed by late 2025 or early 2026.
Journal Article
The problem of small change in early Argentina
Working Paper
Avoiding the inflation tax
I study the effects of inflation on the purchasing behavior of buyers in an economy where money is essential for certain transactions (as in Lagos and Wright, 2005). A long-standing intuition in this subject is that when inflation increases, agents try to spend their money holdings speedily. The standard framework fails to capture this kind of effect (see Lagos and Rocheteau, 2005). I propose a simple modification of the model that improves it in this dimension. I assume that buyers can rebalance their money holdings only sporadically (i.e., not every period). With this minimal change in the ...
Working Paper
Optimal Banking Contracts and Financial Fragility
We study a finite-depositor version of the Diamond-Dybvig model of financial intermediation in which the bank and all depositors observe withdrawals as they occur. We derive the constrained efficient allocation of resources in closed form and show that this allocation provides liquidity insurance to depositors. The contractual arrangement that decentralizes this allocation resembles a standard bank deposit in that it has a demand able debt-like structure. When withdrawals are unusually high, however,depositors who withdraw relatively late experience significant losses. This contractual ...
Journal Article
On the fundamental reasons for bank fragility
A substantial body of literature has now developed as a result of efforts to identify the fundamental reasons for the fragility of financial intermediaries in the Diamond-Dybvig theory of banking. Many of these articles focus on the interaction between sequential service and uncertainty about the aggregate need for liquidity in the economy. The articles in this literature are inevitably technical and focus somewhat narrowly on the implications of specific assumptions. Here, we provide a more accessible discussion of the main ideas and findings in this literature. Our discussion can be used as ...
Briefing
Reforming Money Market Mutual Funds: A Difficult Assignment
The money market mutual fund (MMMF) industry was one of many segments of the financial sector that experienced significant volatility during the 2007?08 financial crisis. Reform efforts have been underway to make the industry more resilient to shocks, but proposals have been controversial. This Economic Brief explores some of the key issues and sheds light on why reforming this industry has been so challenging.