Search Results
Journal Article
Banks venture into new territory
Financial modernization legislation passed in 1999 allows banking organizations to directly invest in any type of company. This merchant banking authority gives banks greater opportunities to provide venture capital to start-up companies and later-stage equity financing to more mature firms. Kenneth Robinson examines how banks have pursued their new merchant banking powers. Robinson finds evidence that organizations that engage in merchant banking tend to be larger than those that do not. His findings are also consistent with the hypothesis that banks may be attempting to lower their average ...
Journal Article
Banking recovery could be vulnerable to interest rate increases
The earnings on assets?generally loans?may not respond as rapidly as the cost of funds?deposits?leading to declining profits.
Working Paper
What was behind the M2 breakdown?
A deterioration in the link between the M2 monetary aggregate and GDP, along with large errors in predicting M2 growth, led the Board of Governors to downgrade the M2 aggregate as a reliable indicator of monetary policy in 1993. In this paper, we argue that the financial condition of depository institutions was a major factor behind the unusual pattern of M2 growth in the early 1990s. By constructing alternative measures of M2 based on banks and thrifts capital positions, we show that the anomalous behavior of M2 in the early 1990s disappears. Specifically, after accounting for the effect of ...
Journal Article
Eleventh District savings and loans outperform industry nationwide
While the larger banking industry grabbed most of the attention, U.S. savings and loans (S&Ls) also felt the strain of the recent financial crisis. Major institutions such as Countrywide Financial and Washington Mutual failed.
Journal Article
Regional lending in a world of interstate banking
Journal Article
Redlining or red herring?
Journal Article
Eleventh District banking industry weathers financial storms
In 2009, the banking industry continued to feel the fallout from the financial crisis that began in mid-2007. Some good news was revealed in recently available first-quarter data, however, which showed profitability rebounding and increases in asset-quality problems slowing down. Whether measured by profits or problems, Eleventh District banks were roughly "twice as good and half as bad" as their counterparts across the nation. Most likely, this reflects the fact that the economic downturn was less severe in the district than in other parts of the nation. ; Another noticeable difference ...