Search Results
Journal Article
Migration in the Tenth District : long-term trends and current developments
The movement of people into and out of a state can have important implications for the state?s economy. The total net inflow of people to a state matters because it affects the overall supply of workers in the state. Economists predict that growth in the national labor force will slow in coming decades as a result of such factors as the aging of the baby boomers and the decline in the fertility rate. As this happens, the availability of workers is likely to become an increasingly more important factor in the location decisions of firms. ; Migration matters not only for the size of a state?s ...
Journal Article
Changes in the depository industry in Tenth District states
Recent development in Congress and the courts have focused attention on the relative roles of commercial banks, thrifts, and credit unions. As concern mounted last year about the state of the thrift deposit insurance fund, Congress required commercial banks to share the burden of recapitalizing the fund. In return, Congress promised to come up with a plan for merging the bank and thrift charters, a move the banking industry has long favored. About the same time, a federal appeals court ruled against a major source of credit union growth since the early 1980s - the acceptance of new members ...
Journal Article
Banking consolidation in Tenth District states
Bank mergers have attracted much attention during the last year due to a surge in mergers among the nation's largest banking companies. The consolidation of the banking industry has been going on much longer, however. Since the early 1980s, the number of banking organizations has fallen by more than a third in both Tenth District states and the nation as a whole. Some of the decline has been due to failures, but most has been due to mergers.> In debating the pros and cons of such consolidation, analysts point to three important ways it may alter the structure of the banking industry. First, ...
Working Paper
The cross-market spillover of economic shocks through multi-market banks
This paper investigates the mortgage lending of banks operating in multiple U.S. metropolitan areas during the housing market collapse of 2007-2009. Some metro areas in the U.S. suffered much greater mortgage defaults than others. We use this regional variation to identify whether high mortgage delinquencies in some markets affected multi-market banks' mortgage lending in other markets. Our results show that multi-market banks reduced local mortgage lending in response to delinquencies in other markets, consistent with the view that local economic shocks can be transmitted to other regions ...
Journal Article
Does faster loan growth lead to higher loan losses?
During the last couple of years, concern has increased that the exceptionally rapid growth in business loans at commercial banks has been due in large part to excessively easy credit standards. Some analysts argue that competition for loan customers has greatly increased, causing banks to reduce loan rates and ease credit standards to obtain new business. Others argue that as the economic expansion has continued and memories of past loan losses have faded, banks have become more willing to take risks. Whichever explanation is correct, the acceleration in loan growth could lead eventually to a ...
Journal Article
Financial stress: what is it, how can it be measured, and why does it matter?
The U.S. economy is currently experiencing a period of significant financial stress. This stress has contributed to the downturn in the economy by boosting the cost of credit and making businesses, households, and financial institutions highly cautious. To alleviate the financial stress and counteract its effects on the economy, the Federal Reserve has reduced the federal funds rate target substantially and undertaken unprecedented actions to support the functioning of financial markets. There will come a point, however, when the Federal Reserve needs to remove liquidity from the economy and ...
Journal Article
Profits of commercial banks in Tenth District states
Journal Article
Small business lending at Tenth District banks
One of the most important roles commercial banks perform is to lend to small businesses. Such lending is vital to the regional economy because small businesses generally lack access to alternative sources of credit and because they account for a major share of job creation. Moreover, small business lending is crucial to the health of district banks because it is one of the few profitable activities in which banks continue to enjoy clear advantages over other financial institutions.