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Report
COVID Response: The Primary Dealer Credit Facility
The Federal Reserve established a new Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF) in March 2020, to allow primary dealers to support smooth market functioning and facilitate the availability of credit to businesses and households, in the face of deteriorating conditions in the market for triparty repo financing due to the coronavirus pandemic. A similar facility had been established in March 2008 to help restore the orderly functioning of the market, following the near-bankruptcy of Bear Stearns, and to prevent the spillover of distress to other financial firms. This paper provides an overview of ...
Journal Article
The Primary Dealer Credit Facility
The Federal Reserve established a new Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF) in March 2020, to allow primary dealers to support smooth market functioning and facilitate the availability of credit to businesses and households, in the face of deteriorating conditions in the market for triparty repo financing due to the coronavirus pandemic. A similar facility had been established in March 2008 to help restore the orderly functioning of the market, following the near-bankruptcy of Bear Stearns, and to prevent the spillover of distress to other financial firms. This article provides an overview of ...
Discussion Paper
The Tri-Party Repo Market Like You Have Never Seen It Before
The tri-party repo market is a large and important market where securities dealers find a substantial amount of short-term funding. Despite its importance, this market was very opaque before the crisis. Since March 2010, in accordance with recommendation 13 of the Task Force on Tri-Party Repo Infrastructure Reform report, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has made monthly data on the tri-party repo market available to the public. Today, with our new interactive tool, there is a whole new way to view the market and its evolution. You can make your own charts, looking at volumes for specific ...
Discussion Paper
Are Higher Haircuts Better? A Paradox
Repurchase agreement (repo) markets played an important role in the 2007-09 financial crisis in the United States, and much discussion since then has focused on the role of repo haircuts. A repo is essentially a loan collateralized by securities. Typically, the value of the securities exceeds the value of the loan and the amount of overcollateralization corresponds to the haircut. In a 2010 paper, Yale?s Gary Gorton and Andy Metrick identified a dramatic increase in haircuts in the bilateral segment of the repo market, which they interpreted as a run on repo. Separately, an industry task ...
Journal Article
Explaining the U.S. tri-party repo market
During the 2007-09 financial crisis, it became apparent that weaknesses existed in the design of the U.S. tri-party repo market that could rapidly elevate and propagate systemic risk. This article describes key mechanics of the market, focusing on two that have contributed to its weaknesses and impacted market reform efforts: the collateral allocation and ?unwind? processes. The authors explain that collateral allocation in the tri-party repo market involves considerable dealer intervention, which can slow settlement processing. The length of time required to allocate collateral has in fact ...
Discussion Paper
Financial Innovation: The Origins of the Tri-Party Repo Market
The conventional wisdom about financial innovation is that it is typically undertaken as a way to increase profits. However, financial innovation can also occur as a response to the need to reduce risk. Tri-party repo is an example of such innovation. While tri-party repo ultimately evolved in ways that created and amplified systemic risk (as we describe in the second post in this series), its origin was as a solution to inefficiencies and risks associated with the repo settlement arrangements prevailing at the time.
Report
The risk of fire sales in the tri-party repo market
This paper studies the risk of "fire sales" in the tri-party repo market, a large and important market where securities dealers find short-term funding for a substantial portion of their own and their clients' assets. We distinguish between fire sales of assets by a dealer who, facing a run that could lead to default, sells securities to generate liquidity, and fire sales of assets by repo investors after a dealer's default has occurred. While fire sales do cause damage no matter how they arise, the tools available to lessen the harm from the two types of fire sales are different. We find ...
Discussion Paper
The Primary Dealer Credit Facility
On March 17, 2020, the Federal Reserve announced that it would re-establish the Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF) to allow primary dealers to support smooth market functioning and facilitate the availability of credit to businesses and households. The PDCF started offering overnight and term funding with maturities of up to ninety days on March 20. It will be in place for at least six months and may be extended as conditions warrant. In this post, we provide an overview of the PDCF and its usage to date.
Journal Article
The impact of interstate banking and branching reform: evidence from the states
Federal interstate banking and branching reform is about to become a reality, with the first phase of new legislation going into effect later this year. Past experience at the state level suggests that reform will accelerate the pace of industry consolidation but may not lead immediately to nationwide banking.
Discussion Paper
Financial Innovation: Evolution of the Tri-Party Repo Arrangement
In our earlier post, we described how the tri-party repo arrangement was a clever way to reduce the costs and risks that individual firms faced when settling bilateral repos. In this post, we explain how the efficiencies created by this new arrangement facilitated the growth of the repo market by expanding the class of securities to be used as collateral. This expansion had benefits as well as costs. On the positive side, it led to lower interest costs for a wide variety of borrowers in the real economy. But on the negative side, tri-party repos backed by riskier assets increase the risk of ...