Search Results
Journal Article
Economic fundamentals and bank runs
Journal Article
Strategic behavior in the tri-party repo market
The repo market in the United States played a significant role during the 2007?2009 global financial crisis. A large portion of the transactions in this market take the form of a tri-party repo, where a third party (a clearing bank) intermediates between the borrower and the lender. The sudden withdrawal of tri-party repo funding was a critical factor leading to the demise of Bear Stearns. It is now widely believed that the tri-party repo infrastructure has some serious vulnerabilities. Using non-cooperative game theory to analyze the strategic interactions between the main players in this ...
Working Paper
Avoiding the inflation tax
Working Paper
Optimal policy with probabilistic equilibrium selection
This paper introduces an approach to the study of optimal government policy in economies characterized by a coordination problem and multiple equilibria. Such models are often criticized as not being useful for policy analysis because they fail to assign a unique prediction to each possible policy choice. We employ a selection mechanism that assigns, ex ante, a probability to each equilibrium indicating how likely it is to obtain. With this, the optimal policy is well defined. We show how such a mechanism can be derived as the natural result of an adaptive learning process. This approach ...
Briefing
The Role of Central Bank Lending in the Conduct of Monetary Policy
Central banks can extend credit in pursuit of different policy objectives, two of which are discussed in this Economic Brief. First, lending can be used to achieve interest rate control. Second, lending can be used to provide liquidity insurance. A narrow view of central bank lending emphasizes the first objective, in which subsidized credit to targeted market participants is not seen as essential. A broader view considers targeted lending as sometimes necessary. Which perspective is favored is largely, though not wholly, dependent on judgments about the prevalence of frictions that inhibit ...
Report
Run equilibria in a model of financial intermediation
We study the Green and Lin (2003) model of financial intermediation with two new features: traders may face a cost of contacting the intermediary, and consumption needs may be correlated across traders. We show that each feature is capable of generating an equilibrium in which some (but not all) traders ?run? on the intermediary by withdrawing their funds at the first opportunity regardless of their true consumption needs. Our results also provide some insight into elements of the economic environment that are necessary for a run equilibrium to exist in general models of financial ...
Briefing
Projecting the Evolution of the Fed's Balance Sheet
As the Fed embarks on balance sheet policy normalization, there is natural interest in understanding the projected evolution of the Fed's asset portfolio over the next three to four years. Several important assumptions are needed to be able to predict the path of the balance sheet. Based exclusively on public information, we use alternative sets of plausible assumptions to construct and analyze several different scenarios for the future of this critical policy-relevant lever.
Journal Article
The problem of small change in early Argentina
Journal Article
Large U.S. Bank Holding Companies During the 2007-09 Financial Crisis: An Overview of the Data
Large banking organizations were at the center of the recent financial crisis in the United States. Their role in the economy and how to regulate them has been the subject of active debate. We study the financial performance of U.S. bank holding companies with more than $10 billion in assets during the period between the beginning of 2005 and the end of 2011. The objective is to provide some perspective on the impact of the crisis on these companies and the way they dealt with and emerged from such stressful times.
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 ...