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Journal Article
Introduction [to A Primer on the GCF Repo® Service]
Repurchase agreements, or repos, are commonly used by financial entities to access money markets. GCF Repo, a financial service provided by the Fixed Income Clearing Corporation (FICC), is a particular type of repo in which trades are executed anonymously, with FICC acting as a central counterparty and guaranteeing settlement. In this primer, which consists of an introduction and two articles, the authors explore the effects on GCF Repo of ongoing reforms to the settlement procedures for another type of repo, tri-party repo. Key areas of focus are the impact of the reforms on the use of ...
Report
Do long-haul truckers undervalue future fuel savings?
The U.S. federal government enacted fuel efficiency standards for medium and heavy trucks for the first time in September 2011. Rationales for using this policy tool typically depend upon frictions existing in the marketplace or consumers being myopic, such that vehicle purchasers undervalue the future fuel savings from increased fuel efficiency. We measure by how much long-haul truck owners undervalue future fuel savings by employing recent advances to the classic hedonic approach to estimate the distribution of willingness-to-pay for fuel efficiency. We find significant heterogeneity in ...
Working Paper
The Effect of the Central Bank Liquidity Support during Pandemics: Evidence from the 1918 Spanish Influenza Pandemic
The coronavirus outbreak raises the question of how central bank liquidity support affects financial stability and promotes economic recovery. Using newly assembled data on cross-county flu mortality rates and state-charter bank balance sheets in New York, we investigate the effects of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic on the banking system and the role of the Federal Reserve during the pandemic. We find that banks located in more severely affected areas experienced deposit withdrawals. Banks which were members of the Federal Reserve were able to access central bank liquidity and so continue or ...
Discussion Paper
Introducing the Revised Broad Treasuries Financing Rate
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in cooperation with the Office of Financial Research, is proposing to publish three new overnight Treasury repurchase (repo) benchmark rates. Recently, the Federal Reserve decided to modify the construction of the broadest proposed benchmark rate (the other two proposed rates are expected to remain unchanged; see the Bank?s announcement on May 24). In this post, we describe the changes to this rate in further detail. We compare this revised rate to the originally proposed benchmark rate and show that, in the post-liftoff period, it trades higher, on ...
Discussion Paper
Excess Funding Capacity in Tri-Party Repo
Security dealers sometimes enter into tri-party repo contracts to fund one class of securities with the expectation they will wind up settling the contract with higher quality securities. This strategy is costly to dealers because they could have borrowed funds at lower rates had they agreed to use the higher-quality securities at the outset. So why do dealers do this? Why obtain or arrange excess funding for the initial asset class? In this post, we discuss possible rationales for an excess funding strategy and measure the extent of excess funding capacity in the tri-party repo market. In a ...
Discussion Paper
The Odd Behavior of Repo Haircuts during the Financial Crisis
Since the financial crisis began, there’s been substantial debate on the role of haircuts in U.S. repo markets. (The haircut is the value of the collateral in excess of the value of the cash exchanged in the repo; see our blog post for more on repo markets.) In an influential paper, Gorton and Metrick show that haircuts increased rapidly during the crisis, a phenomenon they characterize as a general “run on repo.” Consequently, some policymakers and academics have considered whether regulating haircuts might help stabilize the repo markets, for example, by setting a minimum level so ...
Report
Nonlinear pricing with competition: the market for settling payments
The multiple payments settlement systems available in the United States differ on several dimensions. The Fedwire Funds Service, a utility that operates a U.S. large-value payments-settlement service, offers the fastest speed of settlement. Recognizing that payments differ in the urgency with which they need to be settled, Fedwire offers banks a decreasing block-price schedule. This approach allows Fedwire to price discriminate, charging high fees for urgent payments and low fees for less urgent ones. We analyze banks? demand for Fedwire Funds given this nonlinear scheme, taking into account ...
Report
The dynamics of automobile expenditures
This paper presents a dynamic model for light motor vehicles. Consumers solve an optimal stopping problem in deciding if they want a new automobile and when in the model year to purchase it. This dynamic approach allows for determining how the mix of consumers evolves over the model year and for measuring consumers' substitution patterns across products and time. I find that temporal substitution is significant, driving consumers' entry into and exit from the market. Through counterfactuals, I show that because consumers will temporarily substitute to a large degree, failure to account for ...
Discussion Paper
Cash Assets of Foreign Banks: An Example of Seasonal Adjustment Gone Awry
Federal Reserve Statistical Release H.8 provides aggregate data on the assets and liabilities of commercial banks in the United States. Two types of data are provided: one in which each series is adjusted to offset regular, seasonal movements, and another in which no adjustment is made. Recently, a striking pattern has emerged in one particular data series: the cash assets of foreign-related banking institutions.[1] In the seasonally adjusted data, this value has fallen 36 percent since its peak in June 2011?a sharp movement that has generated concern among market observers. The nonseasonally ...
Report
The Market Events of Mid-September 2019
This paper studies the mid-September 2019 stress in U.S. money markets: On September 16 and 17, unsecured and secured funding rates spiked up and, on September 17, the effective federal funds rate broke the ceiling of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) target range. We highlight two factors that may have contributed to these events. First, reserves may have become scarce for at least some depository institutions, in the sense that these institutions’ reserve holdings may have been close to, or lower than, their desired level. Moreover, frictions in the interbank market may have ...