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Journal Article
Challenges in identifying interbank loans
Although interbank lending markets play a key role in the financial system, the lack of disaggregated data often makes the analysis of these markets difficult. To address this problem, recent academic papers focusing on unsecured loans of central bank reserves have employed an algorithm in an effort to identify individual transactions that are federal funds loans. The accuracy of the algorithm, however, is not known. The authors of this study conduct a formal test with U.S. data and find that the rate of false positives produced by one of these algorithms is on average 81 percent; the rate of ...
Discussion Paper
Banks Runs and Information
The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank (SB) has raised questions about the fragility of the banking system. One striking aspect of these bank failures is how the runs that preceded them reflect risks and trade-offs that bankers and regulators have grappled with for many years. In this post, we highlight how these banks, with their concentrated and uninsured deposit bases, look quite similar to the small rural banks of the 1930s, before the creation of deposit insurance. We argue that, as with those small banks in the early 1930s, managing the information around SVB and ...
Discussion Paper
Mapping and Sizing the U.S. Repo Market
The U.S. repurchase agreement (repo) market is a large financial market where participants effectively provide collateralized loans to one another. This market played a central role in the recent financial crisis; for example, both Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers experienced problems borrowing in this market in the period leading up to their collapse. Unfortunately, comprehensive and detailed data on this market are not available. Rather, data exist for certain segments of the repo market or for specific firms that operate in this market (see this recent New York Fed staff report). The ...
Journal Article
An empirical analysis of the GCF Repo® Service
This article examines how dealers use the GCF Repo service. It begins by explaining the strategies that dealers employ when trading GCF Repo and then uses empirical analysis to quantify the predominance of these strategies. Looking across all dealers and all days, the study finds that on an average day, at least 23 percent of dealers focus on strategies to raise cash and at least 20 percent focus on managing their inventory of securities. This activity involves using GCF Repo to both exclusively source collateral and perform collateral swaps.
Report
Reference guide to U.S. repo and securities lending markets
This paper is intended to serve as a reference guide on U.S. repo and securities lending markets. It begins by presenting the institutional structure, and then describes the market landscape, the role of the participants, and other characteristics, including how repo and securities lending activity has changed since the 2007-09 financial crisis. The paper then discusses vulnerabilities in the repo and short-term wholesale funding markets and the efforts to limit potential systemic risks. It next provides an overview of existing data sources on securities financing markets and highlights ...
Discussion Paper
Internal Liquidity’s Value in a Financial Crisis
A classic question for U.S. financial firms is whether to organize themselves as entities that are affiliated with a bank-holding company (BHC). This affiliation brings benefits, such as access to liquidity from other affiliated entities, as well as costs, particularly a larger regulatory burden. This post highlights the results from a recent Staff Report that sheds light on this tradeoff. This work uses confidential data on the population of broker-dealers to study the benefits of being affiliated with a BHC, with a focus on the global financial crisis (GFC). The analysis reveals that ...
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
What Quantity of Reserves Is Sufficient?
A concern of the Federal Reserve is how to manage its balance sheet and whether, over the long run, the balance sheet should be small or large. In this post, we highlight results from a recent paper in which we show how, even during a period of “ample” reserves, the Fed’s management of its balance sheet had material impacts on funding markets and especially the repo market. We argue that the Fed’s “balance-sheet normalization” from March 2017 to September 2019—under which aggregate reserves declined by more than $950 billion—combined with post-crisis liquidity regulations, ...
Report
The impact of competition on technology adoption: an apples-to-PCs analysis
We study the effect of market structure on a personal computer manufacturer?s decision to adopt new technology. This industry is unusual because there exist two horizontally segmented retail markets with different degrees of competition: the IBM-compatible (or PC) platform and the Apple platform. We first document that, relative to Apple, producers of PCs typically have more frequent technology adoption, shorter product cycles, and steeper price declines over the product cycle. We then develop a parsimonious vintage-capital model that matches the prices and sales of PC and Apple products. The ...
Report
Interest rates and the market for new light vehicles
We study the impact of interest rates changes on both the demand for and supply of new light vehicles in an environment where consumers and manufacturers face their own interest rates. An increase in the consumers? interest rate raises their cost of financing and thus lowers the demand for new vehicles. An increase in the manufacturers? interest rate raises their cost of holding inventories. Both channels have equilibrium effects that are amplified and propagated over time through inventories, which serve as a way to both smooth production and facilitate greater sales at a given price. ...