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Discussion Paper
Do Low Rates Encourage Yield Seeking by Money Market Funds?
The term “reach for yield” refers to investors’ tendency to buy riskier assets in hopes of securing higher returns. Do low rates on safe assets encourage such yield-seeking behavior, particularly among U.S. prime money market funds (MMFs)? In a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Financial Economics, I develop a model of MMF competition to understand whether competitive pressure leads these funds to reach for yield in a low-rate environment like the current one. I test the model’s predictions on the 2002-08 period and show that, after controlling for changes in risk premia, declines ...
Discussion Paper
When Are Central Bank Reserves Ample?
The Federal Reserve (Fed) implements monetary policy in a regime of ample reserves, whereby short-term interest rates are controlled mainly through the setting of administered rates. To do so, the quantity of reserves in the banking system needs to be large enough that everyday changes in reserves do not cause large variations in the policy rate, the so-called federal funds rate. As the Fed shrinks its balance sheet following the plan laid out by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) in 2022, how can it assess when to stop so that the supply of reserves remains ample? In the first post of ...
Discussion Paper
Banks’ Balance-Sheet Costs and ON RRP Investment
Daily investment at the Federal Reserve’s Overnight Reverse Repo (ON RRP) facility increased from a few billion dollars in March 2021 to more than $2.3 trillion in June 2022 and has stayed above $2 trillion since then. In this post, which is based on a recent staff report, we discuss two channels—a deposit channel and a wholesale short-term debt channel—through which banks’ balance-sheet costs have increased investment by money market mutual funds (MMFs) in the ON RRP facility.
Discussion Paper
Monetary Policy Transmission and the Size of the Money Market Fund Industry: An Update
The size of the money market fund (MMF) industry co-moves with the monetary policy cycle. In a post published in 2019, we showed that this co-movement is likely due to the stronger response of MMF yields to monetary policy tightening relative to bank deposit rates, combined with MMF shares and bank deposits being close substitutes from an investor’s perspective. In this post, we update the analysis and zoom in to the current monetary policy tightening by the Federal Reserve.
Report
Runs and Flights to Safety: Are Stablecoins the New Money Market Funds?
Similar to the more traditional money market funds (MMFs), stablecoins aim to provide investors with safe, money-like assets. We investigate similarities and differences between these two investment products. Like MMFs, stablecoins suffer from “flight-to-safety” dynamics: we document net flows from riskier to safer stablecoins on days of crypto-market stress and estimate a discrete “break-the-buck” threshold of $1, below which stablecoin redemptions accelerate. We then focus on two specific stablecoin runs, in 2022 and 2023, showing that the same flight-to-safety dynamics also ...
Report
Scarce, Abundant, or Ample? A Time-Varying Model of the Reserve Demand Curve
What level of central bank reserves satiates banks’ demand for liquidity? We estimate the slope of the reserve demand curve in the U.S. over 2010–2024 using a time-varying instrumental-variable approach at the daily frequency. When reserves exceed 12-13 percent of banks’ assets, demand for reserves is satiated and reserves are abundant; below this threshold, the curve’s slope becomes increasingly negative as reserves decline from ample to scarce. We also find that reserve demand has shifted over time, both vertically and horizontally, and identify important drivers of vertical shifts. ...
Report
Monetary Policy, Investor Flows, and Loan Fund Fragility
We show that monetary policy shocks have a positive effect on flows in bank-loan mutual funds. This relationship, however, is asymmetric: positive shocks cause small inflows, whereas negative shocks cause large outflows. Further, the effect of monetary policy shocks is stronger when short-term rates are higher. Finally, we document that large outflows from loan funds lead to significant declines in loan-level prices in the secondary leveraged loan market. Our results identify a novel channel of monetary policy transmission that not only affects a critical segment of the credit sector, but ...
Report
Financial Sanctions, SWIFT, and the Architecture of the International Payments System
Financial sanctions, alongside economic sanctions, are components of the toolkit used by governments as part of international diplomacy. The use of sanctions, especially financial, has increased over the last seventy years. Financial sanctions have been particularly important whenever the goals of the sanctioning countries were related to democracy and human rights. Financial sanctions restrict entities—countries, businesses, or even individuals—from purchasing or selling financial assets, or from accessing custodial or other financial services. They can be imposed on a sanctioned ...
Discussion Paper
Money Market Funds and the New SEC Regulation
On October 14, 2016, amendments to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rule 2a-7, which governs money market mutual funds (MMFs), went into effect. The changes are designed to reduce MMFs? susceptibility to destabilizing runs and contain two principal requirements. First, institutional prime and muni funds?but not retail or government funds?must now compute their net asset values (NAVs) using market-based factors, thereby abandoning the fixed NAV that had been a hallmark of the MMF industry. Second, all prime and muni funds must adopt a system of gates and fees on redemptions, which can ...
Discussion Paper
Preemptive Runs and the Offshore U.S. Dollar Money Market Funds Industry
In March 2020, U.S. dollar-denominated prime money market funds (MMFs) suffered heavy outflows as concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic increased in the United States and Europe. Investors redeemed their shares en masse not only from funds domiciled in the United States (“domestic”) but also from offshore funds. In this post, we use differences in the regulatory regimes of domestic and offshore funds to identify the impact of the redemption gates and liquidity fees recently introduced as part of MMF industry reforms in both the United States and Europe.