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Report
The minimum balance at risk: a proposal to mitigate the systemic risks posed by money market funds
This paper introduces a proposal for money market fund (MMF) reform that could mitigate systemic risks arising from these funds by protecting shareholders, such as retail investors, who do not redeem quickly from distressed funds. Our proposal would require that a small fraction of each MMF investor's recent balances, called the "minimum balance at risk" (MBR), be demarcated to absorb losses if the fund is liquidated. Most regular transactions in the fund would be unaffected, but redemptions of the MBR would be delayed for thirty days. A key feature of the proposal is that large redemptions ...
Discussion Paper
Monitoring Reserve Scarcity Through Nonbank Cash Lenders
In this note, we show that nonbank lenders' behavior as cash lenders can help discern early informative signals about the scarcity of reserves. Reserves, which are deposits that banks and other financial institutions hold at the Federal Reserve, are the most liquid asset on banks' balance sheets and hence play a central role in banks' liquidity management.
Working Paper
The Shift from Active to Passive Investing : Potential Risks to Financial Stability?
The past couple of decades have seen a significant shift in assets from active to passive investment strategies. We examine the potential effects of this shift for financial stability through four different channels: (1) effects on investment funds? liquidity transformation and redemption risks; (2) passive strategies that amplify market volatility; (3) increases in asset-management industry concentration; and (4) the effects on valuations, volatility, and comovement of assets that are included in indexes. Overall, the shift from active to passive investment strategies appears to be ...
Discussion Paper
Money Market Funds and Systemic Risk
On September 16, 2008, Reserve Primary Fund, a money market fund (MMF) with $65 billion in assets under management, announced that losses in its portfolio had caused the value of shares in the fund to drop from $1.00 to $0.97. The news that an MMF had ?broken the buck? spread panic quickly to other MMFs. In the two days following Reserve?s announcement, investors withdrew approximately $200 billion (10 percent of assets) from so-called ?prime? MMFs, which, like Reserve, mainly invest in privately issued short-term securities. The massive redemptions and resulting strains on MMFs contributed ...
Working Paper
The Shift from Active to Passive Investing : Potential Risks to Financial Stability?
The past couple of decades have seen a significant shift in assets from active to passive investment strategies. We examine the potential effects of this shift for financial stability through four different channels: (1) effects on investment funds’ liquidity transformation and redemption risks; (2) passive strategies that amplify market volatility; (3) increases in asset-management industry concentration; and (4) the effects on valuations, volatility, and comovement of assets that are included in indexes. Overall, the shift from active to passive investment strategies appears to be ...
Discussion Paper
Money Market Fund Repo and the ON RRP Facility
Between January 2021 and June 2022, money market funds' (MMFs') investments in the Federal Reserve's Overnight Reverse Repurchase (ON RRP) facility rose by $2 trillion, while their private repo lending fell by almost $500 billion. These sizable shifts give us an opportunity to examine how monetary policy implementation and the ON RRP facility interact with the private repo market.