Search Results
Journal Article
Securities loans collateralized by cash: reinvestment risk, run risk, and incentive issues
Securities loans collateralized by cash are by far the most popular form of securities-lending transaction. But when the cash collateral associated with these transactions is actively reinvested by a lender?s agent, potential risks emerge. This study argues that the standard compensation scheme for securities-lending agents, which typically provides for agents to share in gains but not losses, creates incentives for them to take excessive risk. It also highlights the need for greater scrutiny and understanding of cash reinvestment practices?especially in light of the AIG experience, which ...
Report
All-to-All Trading in the U.S. Treasury Market
Although the U.S. Treasury market remains the deepest and most liquid securities market in the world, several episodes of market dysfunction over recent years have brought the market’s resilience into focus. The adoption of all-to-all trading in the Treasury market could be one avenue to strengthening market resilience. Conceptually, all-to-all trading would allow any market participant to trade directly with any other market participant. This could be helpful in times of stress when the capacity of traditional intermediaries may be tested. In this article, we discuss what all-to-all ...
Report
The Treasury Market Practices Group: creation and early initiatives
Modern money and capital markets are not free-form bazaars where participants are left alone to contract as they choose, but rather are circumscribed by a variety of statutes, regulations, and behavioral norms. This paper examines the circumstances surrounding the introduction of a set of norms recommended by the Treasury Market Practices Group (TMPG) and pertinent to trading in U.S. government securities. The TMPG is a voluntary association of market participants that does not have any direct or indirect statutory authority; its recommendations do not have the force of law. The ...
Discussion Paper
Measuring Settlement Fails
In June 2014, settlement fails of U.S. Treasury securities reached their highest level since the implementation of the Treasury fails charge in May 2009, attracting significant attention from market participants. In this post, we review what fails are, why they are of interest, and how they can be measured. In a companion post following this one, we evaluate the particular circumstances of the June 2014 fails.
Journal Article
Price risk intermediation in the over-the-counter derivatives markets: interpretation of a global survey
In April 1995, central banks in twenty-six countries conducted a global survey of the financial derivatives markets' size and structure. The authors' analysis of the survey results suggests that at the time of the survey, dealers in the aggregate assumed only small exposures to price risks in meeting end-user demands. In addition, despite the derivatives markets' large size, potential price shocks there would still be appreciably smaller in scale than price shocks in the cash markets. Thus, the overall effect of derivatives markets may be to modify and redistribute exposures to price risks in ...
Report
Dealer Capacity and U.S. Treasury Market Functionality
We show a significant loss in U.S. Treasury market functionality when intensive use of dealer balance sheets is needed to intermediate bond markets, as in March 2020. Although yield volatility explains most of the variation in Treasury market liquidity over time, when dealer balance sheet utilization reaches sufficiently high levels, liquidity is much worse than predicted by yield volatility alone. This is consistent with the existence of occasionally binding constraints on the intermediation capacity of bond markets.
Report
The Netting Efficiencies of Marketwide Central Clearing
Market disruptions in response to the COVID pandemic spurred calls for the consideration of marketwide central clearing of Treasury securities, which might better enable dealers to intermediate large customer trading flows. We assess the netting efficiencies of increased central clearing using nonpublic Treasury TRACE transactions data. We find that central clearing of all outright trades would have lowered dealers’ daily gross settlement obligations by roughly $330 billion (60 percent) in the weeks preceding and following the market disruptions of March 2020, but nearly $800 billion (70 ...
Report
Expected repo specialness costs and the Treasury auction cycle
Repo rates for the most recently issued or "on-the-run" securities often diverge from general repo rates. The purpose of this study is to convey that relatively sizable divergences in repo rates for on-the-run issues are normal repeating events for the Treasury market, rather than evidence of abnormal circumstances. The costs associated with these repo market premia are small for short holding periods and are sometimes offset by gains from declining cash market premia for longer holding periods. Moreover, repo specialness costs seem small when considered against the alternative of not ...
Report
The Global Dash for Cash: Why Sovereign Bond Market Functioning Varied across Jurisdictions in March 2020
As the economic disruptions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic increased in March 2020, there was a global dash-for-cash by investors. This selling pressure occurred across advanced sovereign bond markets and caused a deterioration in market functioning, leading to central bank interventions. We show that these market disruptions occurred disproportionately in the U.S. Treasury market and were due to investors’ selling pressures being far more pronounced and broad-based. Furthermore, we assess differences in key drivers of the market disruptions across sovereign bond markets, based on an ...